Let Me Be Your Shield
by karebear
Summary: It's a long road, from hatred and suspicion and fear, through friendship, to love. Alistair/Amell
1. You and I Collide

Title: Let Me Be Your Shield  
><span>Author:<span> karebear  
><span>Rating:<span> T (dark themes ahead: child abuse, implied rape, suicidal thoughts... you know, the usual Dragon Age)  
><span>Characters:<span> Female Amell/Alistair  
><span>Standard Disclaimer (Dragon Age):<span> I don't own these characters or the world they inhabit. Bioware built the sandbox. I just play in it.  
><span>SummaryNotes: Deeper exploration of Amell/Alistair, initially inspired by "Night Watch," now (December 2011) "fixed up" to take into account Rhyanon's more-detailed origin story, told in "How To Save A Life." References to Anders also tweaked to make it fully compliant with "Isolation" - telling stories out-of-order is fun! Some chapters changed more than others, obviously. Some changed not at all. The changes skew more heavily toward the beginning - by the end, I think I'd found my rhythm and nothing really _needed_ to change.

* * *

><p><em>"Let me take the fall,<br>Let me take the blame,  
>Let me carry you from hell to home again...<br>Let me be your shield,  
>Let me take away the pain you feel,<br>Let me be the light that guides your way through darkest night.  
>Let me be your armor."<em>  
>- Assemblage 23, "Let Me Be Your Armor"<p>

"You were a mage hunter?" she spits, and somehow she manages to make it sound more like an accusation than a question.

But despite the angry heat in her voice, he doesn't miss the way she steps back, out of reach, or the way her body tenses as she steels herself against an attack that isn't coming, or the flash of pure terror in her eyes.

And for some reason he can't even figure out, he feels the need to defend himself, or at least convince her that whatever she thinks templars are, that's not who he is.

Maybe it's because she's about to be one of them, a Warden. Maybe it's just because of what Duncan said, about the necessity of playing nice.

Maybe it's because he really can't handle every single mage he talks to thinking his mere presence is an insult or an attack.

"Well how are we supposed to feel?" she demands.

He kicks nervously at the dirt, and before he even realizes it his fingers are tightening around the familiar grip of his sword.

_Great_. Now she has even more reason to think he wants her dead.

He _doesn't_. He can't actually think of a single templar he'd known who'd wanted to kill a mage.

But some of them must, or why would she be _so_ scared?

He hastily lets go of the weapon.

"I never finished my training," he mumbles. "Duncan conscripted me before I took the vows."

From her icy glare, that's a technicality that doesn't exactly matter.

"He saved me, actually," he adds, after the briefest moment of hesitation.

"He saved me too," she says sharply, and for a moment Alistair begins to hope that maybe at least he's found a place to start, until she continues. "He used the Right of Conscription to stop Knight Commander Greagoir from having me executed under suspicion of blood magic."

Alistair's eyes widen.

"_Are_ you a blood mage?"

_Idiot!_ He insists he's not a real templar and _that's_ the question he picks to ask?

"No. Not that it matters. Why should you believe me when none of the other templars did?"

She's waiting for him to attack her, to do what every other templar would do upon hearing the words "blood magic." Good thing he's not a templar. He'd have been the worst one _ever_, because he can't stand the thought of having to kill some innocent kid.

_Not__ an __innocent __kid_, whispers a voice born of years of training. _Abomination.__ Corrupted.__ Demon._

He tells the voice to shut up, because she clearly expects him to try to run a sword through her and he's _not_ going to do that. Darkspawn is one thing, but this... this is something else entirely.

He swallows hard. "I believe you," he says quietly.

At minimum, he trusts Duncan, and when he forces himself to look again at this new companion of his, all he can see is a vulnerable girl, younger even than he is. "And for what it's worth, I'm sorry."

"I don't need your apology," she snaps.


	2. Nightmares and Promises

The dreams are getting worse in every way. Longer, louder, more intense, more often.

And mixed in with the archdemon's voice are guilt-soaked memories of Duncan, accusations, soaked in blood, lying broken in the ruins of Ostagar.

He can hear Rhyanon tossing and turning in her own bedroll not far away, muttering in her sleep. She does it for nearly an hour before she gives up pretending she's the only one awake or that she's going to fall asleep again.

She drags herself over to the fire, but he can't help but notice that when she sits down, it's still far enough away that he would have to get up and walk over if he wanted to touch her. Not that he _would_, but...

"Can't sleep either, huh?" he asks.

"I'm used to it."

"I know what you mean."

She shakes her head. "You think I'm talking about the demon dreams? Sometimes it's not the voices in your head that are crying."

"You're thinking about the Circle again?" he asks, recognizing the darkness in her eyes, the way she shifts and squirms and tries _even __more __than__ usual_ to pretend he isn't there.

"I'm _always_ thinking about the Circle," she says bitterly.

Well, at least she's _talking_ to him. That's a start.

How long has it been?

But how long has it been since Ostagar (_weeks_, and it still _hurts_ inside, like it _just__ happened_), And the brief months he'd spent with the Wardens before that, and Duncan rescuing him from the Chantry, and Redcliffe... Some things you don't forget, not ever.

It's clear enough that she still doesn't trust him, but at least in daylight, she's gotten used to his companionship.

At first glance, she doesn't look like anybody's idea of a mage. She never has. She wears leather armor or hunter's gear instead of robes, for one thing, and unless you saw her fight, you'd never know the power she's capable of.

Unless you could _feel_ it, the way he can. It's like... the crackling sound of a fire, the liquid burn of alcohol, the hyperawareness and rush of invulnerability that comes from lyrium (even though that _scares_ him). And it's all _part __of __her_, all the time.

Underneath the part of her that's just a teenage girl who is afraid to fall asleep.

She sits in the cold shadows rather than moving closer to the warmth of the fire because that would mean getting _close __to __him_.

She plays with the ring on her finger, spinning it around it lazy circles, and pointedly doesn't look at him.

He recognizes the ring of course. It's the one external marker of where she comes from that she hasn't yet abandoned.

Her status as a Warden means she's safe from the apostate label, and the sentence that goes with it, but it's easier this way.

Not that it stops any commoners who see what she is from watching her out of the corner of their eye, full of suspicion and fear, and sometimes, hatred and naked hostility.

Not unlike the way she looks at him.

"You should give that to Morrigan," he suggests.

It wouldn't stop any real templar hunters from seeing (_feeling_) the truth, but it might deflect any casual suspicion.

Though really, with the entirety of the Grey Wardens (all two of them) declared outlaw now, a Chasind apostate seems the least of their worries.

"I tried, she won't wear it. She calls it the mark of a Chantry slave."

He snorts. "Figures."

"She's not _wrong_, Alistair. I had this... friend."

She won't say his name to even a maybe-ex-templar, even though she can't come up with a logical reason why she shouldn't.

"He tried to escape the Tower. More than once." (Five times that she knows about, probably more that she doesn't.) "He asked me to come with him, a couple of times, but I couldn't. I was too scared. After a while, he stopped asking."

"_Good_," he says softly. And she can't tell if it's the templar speaking, or her friend, who doesn't want her dead.

She _doesn__'__t_ talk about the Tower, ever. Alistair knows only bits and pieces of her history, very few of them volunteered by her. It's not like they _talk_.

But what he knows is... unsettling. _Disturbing_. She's tangled up in blood magic and escape attempts, they ordered her _death._And _she__ is __afraid __o f__him_, honestly, genuinely terrified in that primal, illogical way that goes back to childhood.

Because he is a templar, or at least, in her mind, close enough to count.

He is not an _idiot_. He knows more than he probably should about how the Chantry deals with troublemakers. The way she freezes up when she thinks he's upset with her, like she's expecting a hit... it makes _him _want to hit someone, like whoever it is that conditioned that reaction in her.

He hadn't really thought the Circle Tower would be a _paradise_, or anything. But he'd never thought about things from their angle before. They're _mages_, after all. Dangerous. Of course, he knew that most magic manifested between the ages of six and twelve, but somehow he never thought about them as _kids_.

_Multiple escape attempts._

When he was a kid he ran away from the Chantry every chance he got. Multiple times a _week_, in his particularly rebellious phases. And it _always_ meant a beating and extra chores and long hours of penance in the chapel that kept him awake half the night and meant stumbling through the combat training and falling asleep in classes the next day, and _that_ meant more punishment and the other boys laughing at him.

All of which added up to simply giving him _yet __more__ reasons_ to sneak out of the dorms when he could.

Of course, a few strokes of the cane and a pile of pots were never enough to deter him, and mages are not allowed to run away at all, ever. If they do (_when_ they do, apparently - he never thought any of them would try. He should've) they won't be treated like mischievous kids. They'll be treated like criminals, _apostates_, punished with the full extent of Chantry law.

He looks at Rhyanon and thinks about the things he'd been taught, the laws and statues he'd been forced to memorize (all justified by the Chant of course, fiery sermons about the inherent sinfulness of mages and bastard children), the training he'd been through, and it _scares __him_. He thinks about the older boys who'd spent _years_ harassing him in the dorms. He'd been all too happy to have them out of his life, but he realizes now that some of them _must __have_ been assigned to the Tower, turned loose with almost no limits on what they could do to maintain control over the mages they guard. The realization makes him feel slightly sick.

"The Circle Tower has its own dungeon cells, did you know that?" Rhyanon says quietly. "Did you ever wonder _why?_"

Kinloch Hold had been built long before the Circle claimed it. All the old castles have dungeons, built in. Redcliffe had them too. He tells her that, still wanting to believe it's not as bad as he's scared it is now, because he looks at her and he doesn't see a criminal, he just sees _her,_and he hates that she's been hurt.

She shakes her head. "The templars still use them," Rhyanon tells him, and though she _sounds_ calm, he knows enough about not letting others see how much they're hurting you to recognize the signs. Beneath her even tone, she's still shaken by whatever memories are _clearly_ playing in her head. "When they caught him, they locked him in one of those cells, for _months_. They said it was to protect us, that he was dangerous, that they didn't know what he would do. But he wouldn't hurt anybody. He never did anything wrong, except want the same freedom anybody else has. And they tortured him because of it. To show him, to show _us_, that no matter how much power we might have, it can't ever be enough to get away from them."

The Chantry that talks about the Light of the Maker while proving their power through force and fear. Yeah, that sounds about right.

He gives silent thanks once again that Duncan was able to get him out before he was forced to be part of that. Because he knows something else that she can't know - the templars are locked in too. They follow orders because they _have__ to_.

"I never stopped them," she chokes out. "I never really tried... I couldn't. I wasn't brave enough. Because what if they came after me next?"

She's _crying_ now. He has _no __idea_ what he's supposed to do.

So he just does what he'd always wished someone would do when _he_ was crying, in pain, alone against the world that kept him caged, too big to fight and too strong to get away from no matter how often or how far he ran.

He wraps his arms around her, and hopes his _presence_ is enough to reassure her that _someone_ cares. _Amazingly,_ she doesn't fight him.

"Rhyanon," he whispers, the word barely more than a breath leaving his lips. _I__'__m__ sorry_, he wants to say, but he doesn't, because he already tried that, and anyway the words sound trite and meaningless. "I didn't know," he tells her, honestly. "I swear I didn't know."

She wipes her tears away roughly. "Would you have stopped them?" she demands.

"_Yes_," he promises. And what surprises him most of all is that he _means __it_. "I would never let anyone hurt you."


	3. Desperate People

They take first watch together, alert for any more of Loghain's ambushers. This too is a habit they've fallen into. First watch is the best, because if they haven't yet fallen asleep there's no chance of nightmares.

And he's not sure he can handle her crying again, because even though she only did it the one time, it still _hurts_ to think about it, and he knows she likes to pretend it never happened. So they sort of mutually agree to talk about everybody else except themselves.

"So, truth time," he says, flashing her a teasing grin across the fire. Because she _still_ won't sit anywhere close to him, even if she's always got some ready excuse for it. It's better if they're separated, they can keep a better eye on the camp that way, or something equally logical. The soldier in him knows she's _right_. And he smiles at that. Because she still thinks she doesn't know anything about being in an army. "What do think about about _Morrigan_?"

"She scares the hell out of me," Ryhanon admits. Her eyes are flickering and darting out into the dark shadows of the forest surrounding their camp, but she _does_ actually turn around to look at him.

He counts this as a win. After over a month on the road, and fighting _werewolves,_ of all things, he's learned that she does actually possess a sense of humor if someone can draw it out. And she _is_ capable of conversation, though usually with everyone but him.

"Hey look," he points out. "We agree on something!"

He thinks it may be the first time. And he wouldn't have thought it would be _this_. Morrigan is one of the people she'll talk to, actually. It figures they'd get along, with the whole magic thing. But the scary apostate _does_ camp alone, so maybe they really _don__'__t_ get along as well as he'd assumed.

"Still," Rhyanon says. "I can't help but... I don't know... admire her? That sounds so _wrong_. But she doesn't let anyone scare her. Not templars, not anybody. She was never trapped in the Tower. She doesn't have any kind of death threat hanging over _her_ head. _She's_ absolutely free, and she's a complete and utter _bitch_. It's not fair!"

"Aw, don't be jealous, Rhyanon. Look at her! How old is she, d'you think? And she still lives with her mother!"

They laugh until she is nearly choking and he thinks some of his drink may be coming out of his nose. _He __made__ her __laugh._ That fills him with a crazy kind of happiness and pride that makes it _even __harder_ to get control of himself.

She shares her suspicions about Leliana with him.

"She's no priest, Alistair. She's way too good in a fight."

And he can't help but agree, as he digs around in his pack for something else to eat. It seems like he's _always__ hungry_ these days, which is problematic since he feels guilty taking more than the minimum necessary amount of food from the villagers who are losing everything now. He finds some jerky and hands her some, and she takes it gratefully.

"Anyway," Rhyanon says, chewing carefully. "Don't you think it's weird how many criminals the Chantry collects? It's like the last resort of people no one else wants."

"Thought that was the Wardens," he quips.

"Oh, no. We're far beyond the last resort. We get the people so broken even the Chantry won't take them."

True enough, and she's _clearly_ a better Warden than she gives herself credit for. At least she's become pretty much an instant expert at collecting broken people.

She should write a book or something: "How To Form an Army Out Of People Desperate Not to Die."

It started out with Sten, the Qunari who _creeps __him __right __out_. And he had _killed__ people_, a whole family, _kids_... but the Chantry had _literally_ locked him in a cage to starve to death, and he'd seen Rhyanon actually shaking with anger when they met him there in Lothering.

Because she knows what it's like to be imprisoned by the Chantry, to be condemned to a long, slow death just because they fear you.

She'd stormed into the Chantry and confronted the Reverend Mother herself, while he had tried to keep her from (possibly literally) exploding, and Leliana kept the holy woman calm at least enough to stop the templars from hauling Rhyanon off.

Warden or no, a mage violently assaulting the head cleric on holy ground, especially a mage with Rhyanon's history... he's not at all sure he could have stopped it if they decided just to throw her in a cage right next to Ser Creepy.

He certainly couldn't have stopped them from sending her back to the Tower for a trial they all knew would end in only one way. Or, more likely, just putting her to the sword right there to save the effort of getting to Lake Calenhad in the middle of a war.

Except, he'd _promised_ her he'd stop them...

_"I would never let them hurt you."_

It had seemed like the thing to say in the middle of the night, when they were both shaken by the haunting voices in their heads.

But defending a confessed murderer, one who admitted that he doesn't even feel guilty about what he did? (And he's a Qunari, a heretic, thus the prolonged torture in lieu of a quick execution, and it's _disturbing_ that this makes complete sense. Alistair doesn't _want_ to understand the Chantry that works this way.)

Would he really fight good men, some he _knows_, to protect a mage he pretty much just met from the consequences of a completely _insane_ decision?

_Yes_, he realizes._Of__ course__ he __would._

He really would have been the worst templar in the history of the world.

He'd _tried_ telling them that, of course, but no one in the Chantry had ever cared to listen to his opinions anyway, and they responded the same way they _always_ responded to his "smart mouth." He wonders, not for the first time, why the Maker couldn't ever seem to bless any of His servants with a sense of humor. Or a default response to any situation that doesn't involve _violence_ (_ironic_, for a crowd that finds it good fun to stand around spouting quotes like "blessed are the peacekeepers").

It's a good thing Leliana's _really__ good_ at calming people down when she tries.

They'd had to practically run out of the not-so-picture-perfect village (And were there torches and pitchforks? He feels like there were pitchforks, at least), but at least they'd gotten out with their lives.

And _now_, joy of joys, he's got an _Antivan__ Crow_ pitching a tent in his camp. One who that very day had really and truly tried to kill them all (rate they're going, they won't even _get_ to the darkspawn horde before they all die).

He reminds Rhyanon, again, of exactly that.

Assassin. Working for Loghain. Tried to kill us.

"It's not his fault."

_"Really?"_ he says dryly.

"You heard him, Alistair, he's a slave. It wasn't his decision. They took him when he was seven years old and he never had the option of being anything else. And he made _one __mistake_ and they'll kill him for it."

Ah. So that's what this is about. Of course it is.

Rhyanon was seven when the templars hauled her off to the Tower.

"Well, I can't say I'm sorry about the mistake he made," he mutters.

She takes risks on people that are quite frankly terrifying, and he's almost _positive_ it's going to get them killed.

But he really does think he's starting to love her because of it.


	4. Familiar Roads

They camp outside of Orzammar, because Rhyanon likes to feel the open air, see the stars, and he prefers it that way too, given the choice.

It's really too bad Grey Wardens are supposed to spend so much of their time underground in the Deep Roads.

Hey, he's found another good thing about a Blight: at least they won't have to suffocate in some cave when they go hunting for darkspawn.

"Can you believe that dwarf girl actually _wants_ to go to the Tower?" Rhyanon asks incredulously.

Alistair shrugs, noting that she's actually able to talk about the Tower now _almost_ easily. Someone who doesn't know to look might not even realize that she's clearly still haunted by the place.

"She likes reading, right?" he points out. "Their library's the best in Ferelden. Better than the king's, even."

Rhyanon nods absently, and he tells her that Duncan had said the same thing, "You could read forever and never get to all of them."

But unlike Duncan and this dwarven girl Dagna, _she__'__d_ been trapped there, forever and ever. And reading gets old _real_ fast when it's all you're ever allowed to do.

"Did you ever talk to the templars?" he asks her.

"Why would I?"

_Why indeed? _

It would be like him _talking_ to the Chantry people in charge of making sure _he _followed the rules. The thought had never even crossed his mind.

They were prison guards, enemies, people to avoid at all costs.

He wonders if that's still how she thinks of him.

He'd been to the Circle Tower once, for a couple of weeks, and he remembers the place being very _serious_.

He tries to remember if he'd seen Rhyanon there, but he doesn't think so. Most of the mages he'd seen were adults, the senior enchanters, and the other templars had kept him in their dormitories or in the chapel for most of his time there.

He'd gotten the feeling they didn't talk to the mages either, an intuition which has only been confirmed by everything Rhyanon has said and not said.

But... not _all_ of the initiates he'd known in Denerim were awful. Plenty of them _acted_ like the stupid kids they were, and some of them even stood up for him on occasion, or at least commiserated with him when it was completely obvious that he didn't deserve whatever punishment he was usually suffering through.

He smiles, remembering that as he'd gotten older, that "commiserating" usually took the form of getting drunk on cheap ale. He wasn't the _only_ one who'd despised templar training.

"_You_ were bored, right?" he asks Rhyanon. He understood how she felt about being locked inside all the time, he's _certain_ he'd have hated it. "Don't you think they must've been bored too? I mean, at least you could throw fireballs, lightning... What do they do, stand around all day?"

Stand around all day, with swords, waiting for a reason to use them. And _that__'__s_ scary from both sides.

"Do you know what it's like to be watched _all __the__ time?_" she asks him, and the _question_ sounds like an accusation.

"No," he admits.

He knows what it's like to be ignored.

He knows what it's like to go days, maybe weeks, without anyone caring to check if you're even alive or dead.

He's heard a lot of people, especially kids, claim they'd prefer it that way, not having any adults around to constantly hover.

Maybe in Rhyanon's case it's even true.

But Redcliffe was a small community, and it was all too obvious that people went out of their way to avoid having him around.

He was shunted off to the side: first to the stables, then to the Chantry, and everywhere he went he heard the whispers: _bastard_, born of sin, a child no one could ever want.

Like it was his fault who his parents were.

He didn't belong in the castle, that much was made _explicitly_ clear, by the servants usually, scary ladies whose hands seemed _made_ for hitting. He'd avoided them as much as possible, good thing he was such a fast runner.

But when Arl Eamon came to spend time with him (and _why_ would he do that, for just another orphan? More rumors, more whispers, more angry glares), his wife, the arlessa, was never far, and the way she looked at him was far more frightening than even the meanest of the serving women.

It was like she was looking _through_ him, like he didn't exist at all. Like he was _nothing_.

He'd asked the arl about it once, glancing around nervously to make sure there wasn't anyone around to hear him asking impertinent questions of his betters.

Arl Eamon never hit him, told him not to be afraid to speak his mind, and even seemed to like listening to his questions and stories, but that didn't stop other people from taking it upon themselves to remind him that children were meant to be seen and not heard.

And when it came to him, even the "seen" part was not preferred.

But the day he finally worked up the courage to ask if there was some special reason the Arlessa seemed to hate him more than most people did, Arl Eamon just told him not to worry about it, that Isolde would come around.

Sometimes he tried to play with the other boys in Redcliffe, but most of them believed the rumors about the arl being his father, and they resented him for the special treatment he received, "living in the castle all high 'n mighty, like he's better'n us," they'd sneer.

It didn't matter to them that he slept in the stables, and could count on one hand the number of times he'd actually been inside the castle proper.

He was okay in a fight, but they'd often get a whole gang together to ambush him, and most of them were older and bigger than he was.

And when he did wander back home, nursing his scrapes and bruises, he'd usually get the switch for "fighting in the street like a common hooligan."

Which was _so_ not fair, because they reminded him over and over again that he _was_ a common hooligan who should know better than to put on airs, and then they punished him for acting like one.

Nothing he did was _ever_ right.

These problems did not go away when he was sent to the Chantry.

If anything, they got _worse_.

The other templar recruits didn't like him any better than the urchins in Redcliffe had, _and_ they were trained to know how to fight.

He'd hated being forced to spend hours and hours inside the Chantry's small, dark rooms, listening to long lectures and memorizing the Chant of Light, which he is still pretty sure does not _ever_ actually end. Teagan had tried to teach him his letters, but most of the words in the Chantry's books were very long and impossible to understand.

As he'd drifted into daydreams, he'd often found himself wondering how the templars and priests in charge of his classes could make something as thrilling and terrifying as magic seem _boring_. Sometimes he wondered what it would be like to be a mage. At least then he could set his teachers' robes on fire.

The thought _always_ made him giggle, and that meant everyone looking at him (_more_ angry glares), _and_ it meant getting in trouble, _again_, he could _still_ never do anything right. No proper dinner, just scraps shoveled down as he scrubbed mountains of pots under the vigilant eye of the stupid head cook and her stupid wooden spoon. The way she used it, the thing was a vicious weapon, and she was more attached to it than most of the templars were to their swords.

"I honestly think that's why the Revered Mother didn't want to let Duncan have me," he tells Rhyanon with a smile. "Maker forbid, she might actually have to wash her own dishes."

"Or find some other poor sucker with a smart mouth to do it."

"Yeah," he sighs. "Probably that one."

But he notices that she doesn't seem mad at him anymore.

The skies are beginning to lighten and they've yet to pick their direction for travel.

"We've still got the treaty, for the Circle," he reminds her gently.

"I know," she says, and her dark tone makes it clear she's not keen to use it.

They have been in the Brecilian Forest and the Deep Roads. She has defeated ancient Dalish curses and Dwarven politics and she'd even made it look _easy_, but as he's _just__been__reminded_, the Tower is still dangerous. Off-limits for conversation, and _definitely_ off-limits for travel plans.

Not that he can blame her.

Not that he has much ground to stand on.

He hasn't mentioned Redcliffe with any seriousness either, since their first strategy session in Lothering ages ago.

But now they're running out of other options.

And he knows that if he lets her pick she's gonna make the choice that lets her avoid her own fears as long as possible.

Time to confront his own drama.

As they head down the familiar road, with the castle looming in the skyline, he pulls her aside.

"Look, there's something I probably should have told you a long time ago..."

Whatever he'd been expecting, her blank non-comprehension is not it.

She tells him she doesn't care who his family is, that it doesn't _matter_ to her at all.

But why would it?

If mages have families, if they have lands or titles or _rights_ to claim, they lose it all when the templars take them.

She has no reason to have even considered what being the bastard child of a king might mean, what is _does_ mean, for him, now that Cailan is dead.

Until he spells it out for her, that he could be the king of Ferelden, except he doesn't _want_ it.

"I guess I just didn't want you to treat me any differently," he says sheepishly.

She shrugs, and tells him that to her, he's still just Alistair.

Just Alistair, the maybe-templar, maybe-prince, probably her friend.


	5. Down in the Dark

The path under the windmill is damp and slick, thick with mold. Rhyanon can tell when they get to the castle though, because the stones immediately feel much... sturdier, somehow. And drier, at least.

They enter through an old, rusted trap door into the lowest level of the castle, the basement, the dark. It smells like death, like blood and shit and rot and decay, made stronger by the memory of the living corpses they'd spent the night fighting, who got up again and again, never screaming, even as they burned. They just kept coming, swarming and surrounding them, with two or three to take the place of any one that fell.

It's a miracle they're still alive, really.

There are thick gates here, locked cells with scratches and stains marking the stone. Thankfully, all the ones she peers into are empty except for old straw and scattered sacks and barrels.

_All the old castles have dungeons._

This place makes her nervous.

She hurries along, not careful enough. If there are any more of those things lurking here, they'd be on her before she'd notice.

Alistair grabs her arm, and she almost screams. She shoves him away, hard, then realizes who he is, and takes a careful breath.

"Sorry," she mutters.

"Listen," he whispers. "Do you hear that?"

Clinking metal, like... a chain, or something? And breathing.

Someone's alive down here, a human being. Those walking dead hadn't breathed.

"Who's there?"

The voice is a hoarse whisper, much harsher than she remembers, but she recognizes it immediately.

Jowan.

She'd _never_ expected to see him again.

It's an instant flashback to the Tower, and everything she'd ever hated and feared about that place rushes in, threatening to overwhelm her. Her fingers clutch her staff, tight enough to hurt, as though she can anchor herself that way. Her heart pounds, fast and heavy, under her skin.

He's huddled back against the wall, holding out his chained hands as though he could still protect himself from the blow he's no doubt expecting.

He's covered in his own blood.

Her stomach twists and tangles. She feels like she can't even breathe down here, and she's not the one behind the bars.

The templars let Anders rot in a cell _just__ like__ this __one_.

Jowan had left her to _die_.

But as angry as she'd been at him, she'd nursed at least a flicker of hope that _one_ of her friends might have gotten away.

He doesn't deserve _this_.

Nobody deserves this.

But maybe this really is the only place a mage can end up.

For them, there's no such thing as freedom. Just different cages, different jailers.

"So here we are again, the two of us," Jowan says. His voice sounds dead, rough from disuse, hoarse from screaming.

"What _happened?_" she asks him, and _her_ voice breaks.

It's such a small, simple question, but the answer's not simple at all.

_How did we get here?_

Where to begin?

The part where he ran away from her, someone he'd once called a best friend, abandoning her with the woman he claimed to love, _knowing_ the punishment they'd take for cooperating with his escape.

Destroying his phylactery, helping him flee... that alone would have been enough to condemn her.

Lily probably would have been safe, until he revealed himself as a blood mage. Then death was certain, for both of them.

No. Death for her. Aeonar for Lily.

_Better__ or__ worse?_ At least the sword is quicker.

How long had he been lying to them before that day when everything changed?

"What are you doing here, Jowan?"

"Dying slowly in a dungeon cell, apparently," he says, a last desperate attempt at humor. But it's lost, because he's telling the truth, and he can't manage sarcasm anymore.

"I mean in Redcliffe," she clarifies, but she's already starting to reach for him, through the bars. He's hurt, he's broken, physically and emotionally. He's exhausted, sick of running, sick of trying to fight.

And he's _sorry_, for everything, for every choice he's ever made.

If this is how things end for them, maybe the Chantry's been right all along. Maybe magic _is_ a curse.

"Lady Isolde hired me," he tells them. "The boy, Connor, he'd started to show... signs. She wanted me to help him, teach him how to hide his magic, so he wouldn't be sent to the Circle."

Rhyanon nods.

Lucky kid.

Too bad their own families hadn't cared enough to protect them. Maybe none of this would've happened if they had.

"Connor's a mage?" Alistair repeats.

And the way he says it makes it _abundantly_ clear to her that no matter _what_he says, he's still a templar.

They can pretend all they want, but down here, in the dark, they go back to what they really are.

"Lade Isolde said you poisoned the arl," Alistair snarls. He leans in closer to Jowan's cell, and his eyes are hard and angry, and it's all too easy to imagine him as a templar, a _real_ one, like the guards outside of Anders' cell, who threatened her when she tried to be there for a friend. Like the one who gave her the scar that marks her as Circle more clearly than any ring ever could.

He's _threatening_ Jowan, even though the other man is helpless, bound and bleeding on the other side of a locked door. He's _assuming __guilt_ without _any__ proof_, knowing _nothing_ about Jowan except for the accusations thrown against him. And he'd _kill_ Jowan without a single regret.

He'd kill her too, she has _no__ doubt_, not watching him now. _They__ are__ not__ on __the__ same__ side_, and they never have been.

"I didn't _want_ to," Jowan stammers. But he _sounds_ defeated, like he's said it before, again and again, and no one's ever listened before. And she knows what that's like. "Teryn Loghain made me to do it. He knew about the bounty on my head, he said he'd turn me over to the templars if I didn't!"

Oh, _Jowan_...

"Why would you listen to Teryn Loghain of all people?" she asks. She keeps her own voice soft and gentle. This _isn't_ an interrogation, no matter what Alistair thinks.

No matter what's happened, Jowan had been her friend.

"He said if I did it, he'd fix things, with the Circle. He said he could get the death sentence lifted."

She shakes her head, sadly.

"Nobody could do that, Jowan. Not for a blood mage."

"But I'm not," he insists. "I just... I haven't used magic at all since that day, not really. Just the simplest apprentice spells, to show Connor."

"It doesn't _matter_. Once is enough."

_You __know __that_, she doesn't say, because _of__ course _he knows that and he's always known that. He grew up in the Circle same as her.

He's already suffered enough and it's not like reminding him of it will change anything.

"So are you going to kill me then?" he asks. There is a tinge of hope in his voice, but she can't tell if he's hoping the answer is no or yes.

"No."

She opens the door. The lock is remarkably simple to pick. "Go on, Jowan. Get out of here. You won't get another chance."

"He's a blood mage!" Alistair shouts. "You can't just let a blood mage go!"

"Is this Alistair who speaks, or the templar?" Morrigan wonders.

Rhyanon wonders if there's ever really been a difference.


	6. Just in Case

It's been a long, _long_ day, soaked in blood and death, and she feels like crying. She starts picking up kindling to throw into the fire, out of habit.

Alistair is pacing. He tells her he wants to talk about it, and she _really_ doesn't, but she nods.

She wasn't expecting him to yell at her.

"He was a _child_, and you killed him! How could you do that?"

This is the same man who'd wanted her to leave her friend in a dungeon cell to die?

And stupid, _stupid_ Jowan hadn't run when she'd given him the chance, so that's exactly where he is now, locked up in a cage, dying slowly.

Right back to where they started.

He hadn't even killed anybody. Connor - not Connor - the demon, the abomination, had killed _dozens_ of people, and resurrected their corpses to make more of their kind.

Connor was already dead.

"You're _really_ saying I should have used blood magic?" she spits. "_You?_"

"No! I don't know. Maybe. I just... maybe there was another way. Maybe the Circle could've done something..."

Maybe? _Maybe?_

"You're a templar, Alistair, you know exactly what would have happened to that boy if we took him to the Tower! Don't you _dare_ blame this on me!"

"Just forget it," Alistair hisses, and he stalks away.

But how could she?

How could she forget any of this, ever?

Neither of them sleep that night, but for the first time in a long time, they don't talk either.

They stay in their own cold tents while the campfire burns down to embers without them.

He's still mad at her, which _sucks_, because she needs to talk to _someone_.

_Him_, though? He's a _templar_, he'd certainly proven that well enough today.

But of the two of them, _she__'__s_the one that just killed a little boy. She did _exactly_ what a templar would do.

Does that mean they're _right_?

She grew up in the Circle.

Of course she knows about the threat of demons, pulling at them all in their dreams, whispering at the minds and souls of the weak or the untrained or the just unlucky, waiting to turn them into abominations.

She'd seen it, _felt_ it, in the Harrowing.

The templars always said it could happen to _any_ of them, but she'd always thought it was just an excuse, a justification for all kinds of abuses.

The way Greagoir stacked Anders' punishments, making them as torturous as he could on purpose, because maybe if they hurt him enough at least he'd _think_ before he tried to run again.

The fact that they punished Anders _at __all_, because he fought against a system that ripped children away from their homes and families and locked them in a prison for the rest of their lives.

And the idea that they'd rather _kill__ her_ than take even the slightest chance that she'd been corrupted by blood magic. Just like she'd killed Connor, and he hadn't even _known_ what he was doing was a death sentence. At least she'd understood the _risks_. If she sees that little boy as _just_ an abomination, while _Alistair_ sees a child... doesn't that make her just as bad, _worse_, than the templar she's accusing him of being?

"Just in case," is a templar phrase, the answer they'd always loved to give her.

"Just in case of _what_?" she'd always asked.

Now she has the answer, and it _hurts_, and everybody hates her and she deserves it, because they're _right_, and they always have been.

She lies awake in the dark, swallowed by guilt and fear.

And it feels familiar. It feels almost right.


	7. Everybody's Out For Themselves

They're still basically avoiding one another, but Rhyanon had promised Alistair that they'd look for his sister in Denerim, and he still wants to try, so she goes with him.

It turns out to be a spectacularly bad idea.

The woman's a bitch, all around, even _Morrigan_ agrees.

She tells Alistair that the Redcliffe guards had thrown her out of the castle with the news that her baby brother had died, and the way she says it implies that she wishes it were true.

But since it isn't, she'll take what she can get from him.

And that's not a relationship, or even a conversation, it's just money.

Alistair tosses her a few coins, because he has them to spare. It doesn't hurt him to lose gold nearly as much as it hurts to lose the possibility of having a family somewhere, _someone_ that might care about what happens to him.

"Everybody's out for themselves, Alistair," Rhyanon tells him. "You _have_ to learn that."

It comes out sounding a lot more cruel than she'd intended.

It's not something she'd usually say to him, but she's still bitter at the fact that he'd left her alone the night she'd pretty much needed him the most, too wrapped up in his regrets about a family he'd adopted in his head to see the _real__ woman_ in front of him now.

And there's a darker part of her that thinks it's only fair. She was ripped away from her family by _people__ like__ him_, so why should he get some kind of happy reunion?

And anyway, it's _true_.

_True __tests __never__ end_, the demon had whispered as she fought her way out of the lyrium-fueled cage the Harrowing had locked her into.

She'd never been forced into the Fade before. It had always been her choice to visit the dream realm, and she could always leave at will.

Not that time. She could _feel_ the walls around her even where there were none to be seen.

"Can't you feel the sword at your neck?" they'd taunted, _knowing_ how she'd react to the reminder of the one thing she could _never_ forget. The templars _always_ held the power of life and death over her. Their weapons, their walls, their intimidating presence was _always_ close.

The Harrowing was a one-time thing, maybe, but the _cage_ never went away.

Trapped in here, dead out there.

_Always_.

Unless she fought.

She'd battled against the demons in that dream with all the ferocity she'd never been allowed to turn against the templars who forced the fight. They _hurt__her_, and she could never hurt them back.

They taught her _not__ to__ fight_, taught her that _control_ meant taking their hits without a _word_, taught her that _willpower_ meant never letting _anyone_ see how she really felt.

Good thing she had other people close to her, to teach her other lessons.

_They don't win unless you let them._

So she fought.

_The real dangers are preconceptions, careless trust..._

Yeah, _never__ trust_, that one she'd learned pretty well. Nobody helps you unless you help yourself. She _tried_ to help Anders, but when it _really__ mattered_ she was too afraid to really try, and the templars. wouldn't let her anyway.

And she and Anders both had known that if she _had_ done more, it would have only given the templars more power to hurt them.

Because there's no such thing as love in the Circle Tower.

And everybody's out for themselves. Human, demon, darkspawn... _everything_ fights to survive.

And if they have to go through you, to hurt you or kill you, to keep themselves alive, they'll do it.

So she's not surprised _at__ all_ when Zevran attacks them in a Denerim back-alley that night.

And she doesn't really _want_ to kill him, because they'd become friends, of a sort. He'd told her crazy stories about Antiva and they'd commiserated about how much it sucked to have no family in a world that's _built_ on family, stashed away in some dark hole, surrounded by men just waiting to kill you.

She knows Zevran doesn't really want to kill her either. Murder's never personal, with him. He took a contract, that's all, and his feelings about the mark, if any, do not have anything to do with it.

He comes at her, and she kills him first, because it keeps her alive.

To his credit, Alistair does not even say "I told you so."

"I've been thinking," he tells her later, in the camp. And although she'd usually give him grief about that, she's not sure where they stand right now, so she just lets him talk.

He seems as surprised as she is that she's not making a joke. He clears his throat nervously. He probably figures she's still mad at him. He's _probably _right.

"About what you said," he clarifies. "You're right. I can't let other people tell me what I want. I have to stand up for myself more often."

And gives him a hesitant smile, testing the waters. Because it's _exhausting_ being angry all the time. And she doesn't want to be afraid of him anymore. "As long as you still listen to me, I think that's a great idea," she teases.

"Oh, of course," he drawls. "Your wish is my command, my lady."

He's smiling again, that huge Alistair-grin that she loves so much, and he wraps his arms around her, warm and strong, and _she__ lets __him_.

"Does this mean we're not fighting anymore?" she whispers.

He kisses her, which is probably better than any verbal answer she could hope to hear, except... what the _hell_? She squirms in his arms and _pushes _him away, hard. Physically, and maybe with just a little magical force thrown in.

He staggers backward, shocked and panting. "Sorry," he stammers. "I'm _so_ sorry, Rhyanon. I didn't, I don't... I..."

She doesn't give him the time to figure out what he's trying to say, just turns her back on him and burrows into her own tent.

To lay awake all night, _again_, trying to make sense of her _own_ feelings.

Because when he kissed her, it didn't feel _wrong_.


	8. I Didn't Know You Cared

Rhyanon seems to want to pretend that the kiss thing never happened, and he's perfectly fine with _that_, because just the thought of it makes him want to drop dead from embarrassment. Stupid, stupid, _stupid!_

Thankfully, they've been tromping around through a _terrifyingly__ creepy_ town occupied by cultists, and are now in the bowels of an old mountain filled with _dragons_, so there's plenty to distract them from stupid stuff like _feelings_.

She pulls out a vial of lyrium and he winces.

_"What?"_ she snaps, and he flinches _again_, because she's still mad at him, _clearly._

Maybe he can pretend he's just reacting to the pain. One of the crazy Andraste cult's baby dragons had ripped up a good chunk of his leg.

"I just wish you wouldn't do that," he says, very softly.

"Do you want to walk away from this or not? If I'm going to have any chance at healing you, I need _something_ to help me. After that fight, I'm not sure I could light a candle without a boost."

And she _is_ exhausted, he can tell. Every step she takes makes him wonder if she's going to collapse before they make it out of these damned ruins.

She's a mage. For her, lyrium is life.

Just half of the tiniest vial can fill her with more excited energy and _power_ than a full night's sleep (and lately it seems like lyrium is the easier one for her to find). She still flushes when the stuff courses through her system, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet, giggling like a little girl.

"Everything is so much _easier_, Alistair, you have no idea. It's like... the whole world is brighter. And there's magic everywhere and I can touch _all_ of it!"

He loves hearing her laugh, but watching her drink in that stuff like it's _nothing_... it terrifies him. And there's something else there too, some other feeling swirling under the surface. Is he _jealous?_

Mages _can't_ become addicted to lyrium; something about their constant contact with the Fade removes the possibility.

"Anyway, templars use lyrium too, don't they? I've seen them."

Alistair nods weakly.

How much had she seen?

Not enough, apparently.

But that's not surprising. The templars hole up in their dormitories when they're not at their posts.

They cannot _ever_ let the mages see them weak. That much has been drilled into him since he was ten years old.

He's a templar... _was_ a templar. He isn't anymore, thank the Maker.

But still, for him, lyrium is death.

He wasn't exaggerating; Duncan _had_ saved his life. Even the darkspawn taint, with all it brings, the dreams and the voices and the violent death at the end of it all, is preferable to the slow decay of lyrium addiction.

"You don't _need_ lyrium to make templar powers work," he tells her. "Lyrium just makes templar powers work _better_. Or at least that's what they told me. Maybe it doesn't even do that."

"What are you talking about?" she asks. But her voice has softened, and he _might_ even call it concerned.

"You know what lyrium _does_ to people who aren't mages, right? You've seen it in Denerim, yeah?"

He certainly had, but maybe that's only because he'd known what he was looking at. "It's a _drug_, it's addictive, it makes people crazy!"

They literally lose their minds, over time, until the lyrium is the only thing holding them together. Until they're too broken to use, and then they're discarded, cast aside to scrabble for whatever existence they can scrape together, or die.

He's _seen_ it.

"They lose their memories, their ability to reason... _everything_ except the need for more of the stuff in those vials you carry around so easily. And the Chantry forces it on their templars, a little at a time, a little more every day... you don't know you're addicted until it's too late to break away. And since _they_ control the lyrium trade with the dwarves... I'm sure you can put two and two together."

Her eyes are wide, and she lets out a long, slow breath. "Damn," she whispers. "And here I thought it was only mages they knew how to control."

She stuffs the vial down to the bottom of her pack, as though that can make him forget about its existence.

"If you want, I'll stop using it."

_Wow, __really_? He'd _never_ have figured she'd care about his reaction _that_ shakes his head slowly. "No, that's okay. If it helps you..."

He smiles, because this shouldn't be allowed to happen. He's _letting _a mage know all the deepest secrets of Chantry control, letting her see him weak, letting _her_ have _power_ over _him_. Letting her _care_.

She smiles too, pulling out the lyrium again, but only using the _tiniest_ bit, just enough to fix him up.

A mage caring about a templar?

Or Rhyanon caring about _him_?


	9. Answered Prayers

"I thought you hated the Chantry," Rhyanon whispers.

Alistair turns to look at her, pulling his attention from the Urn only with great reluctance.

Why _does_ he care so much? Didn't they _both_ agree it was just some made up story?

But when Leliana speaks about how miraculous and wonderful it is, he... agrees. He _believes_ it.

"I _did_," he whispers, in answer to Rhyanon's question. _I_ _do_," he adds quickly, thinking of all the horrible abuses, big and small, that they've both seen those clerics perpetuate from behind false smiles. "I never said I hated the Maker."

"The Maker_ doesn't __exist,_" Rhyanon reminds him very pointedly. "Even your Chantry says that."

He sighs.

It's her Chantry too, though she won't admit it.

They both know you can't grow up surrounded by something without picking up a few of the pieces, even if you hate them.

"The Maker's not _here_, is what the Chantry says. He _can_ still hear you. And watch over you."

She turns away.

He doesn't want to fight about this, he needs to make sure she's not angry, so he follows her.

But to his surprise, she doesn't attack him with hits or with words.

She just stands there in front of the Urn, enveloped by the same awesome power he and Leliana feel here.

Her Chantry too.

"Are you _crying_?" He swears he sees tears welling up in her eyes.

"No," she says stupidly.

"What are you doing then?" he asks, after a just-long-enough-to-be-uncomfortable pause.

"Praying," she says softly.

Praying.

Not in a chapel, long lectures and sermons and false words to memorize, but a child's desperate whispers in the night.

He thinks about everything he's learned from her about the Chantry prison _she_ grew up in, and he knows she understands.

How many times had he lain awake, begging for a miracle.

She must have too.

Just let me go _one __day_ without the cane.

_Keep him free_, just for a little while. _Keep him safe._

_Get me out of here._

It _worked_, is the thing.

When they asked for help, in voices no one else heard or listened for, they got what they needed.


	10. Are You Sure?

They spend almost every night together and have for a long time, but it's always been in front of the campfire, or on watch, never sharing a tent.

Sometimes it's been calm and quiet, sometimes they stay up sharing stories and laughing uproariously. Sometimes, more often than she wants to admit, actually, it's just _really_ awkward, because neither of them know what to say, because the wrong _word_ can leave them angry at each other for _days_, each afraid to set the other one off.

And then there are the nights when that they refuse to spend together at all. And those nights... _hurt_. She dreads them, and she can tell by the way he flicks not-subtle glances at her all through the following days that he hates them too. It makes her heart race and when they come back together again, through some agreement that doesn't need words. She curls up next to him (and when did _that _start? She doesn't even _remember_). He wraps his arms around her and he feels warm and strong and _safe_.

She is not supposed to feel safe with him, he is a _templar_.

He _isn__'__t_ though.

Because if he _was_, she _wouldn__'__t_ feel safe with him. She wouldn't _want_ him, so desperately, she is _so __sick_ of being alone.

She's never felt like this in her entire life. Not even with Anders. She _hates_ that she has to admit it, but she never felt safe or _really_ comfortable with him either. It wasn't his _fault_, but he had to try too hard to joke, to cover the truth, to _make__ her_ relax, she was always looking over her shoulder, and there was too much worry and pain mixed up in everything about him. Anders was - _is_ - her best, best friend. But he isn't _this_.

The night is cold, and even when their watch is over she can't bring herself to leave him to go spend another night not-sleeping all by herself. Even in the Tower, she could always hear other people breathing, moving around in their sleep, flickering firefly-lights through their fingers when they knew they wouldn't get caught.

"Stay with me," she whispers, as Alistair turns to leave after walking with her to the tent.

He reacts like a thirteen-year-old, all stammering and adorable. Somehow he manages to choke out _enough_ of a protest for her to be shocked and still kind of amused and worried all at the same time.

"You've really _never_...?"

The way he blushes is all the answer she needs, and it stuns her.

She knows about the templar vows, of course, but she also knows how rare it is to find one who actually keeps them.

The Circle Tower is a looming shadow in the middle of a very large lake, purposely built to be nearly impossible to get into or out of. But still, people have needs. That will never change, no matter how remote their prisons.

The better men had availed themselves of the whores at Calenhad's dock.

The others... well, they used what was on hand. They had their pick of innocent children who couldn't resist or escape without marking themselves for death.

She'd heard them crying in the night, seen the way they flinched away from any touch, the way they forcefully avoided looking at the templars who were everywhere in that place, as though by ignoring them they could make them go away, make _what __they__ did_ go away.

Some of them even went to the chapel, confessing their sin to deaf ears.

The Maker doesn't forgive mages. They're cursed, and whatever happens to them happens because they deserve it.

They'd never done it to her, and she supposes she should consider herself lucky. But she _doesn't __know __why_, and that almost makes it worse.

What was she supposed to say to the little girls who wondered why this was happening to them while she was safe? How was she supposed to explain that nothing she did could protect them?

"I guess I was just raised not to take this sort of thing lightly," Alistair tells her.

_Me __too_, she thinks.

And shouldn't just those _memories_ be enough to push him away again?

She doesn't, though. She takes his hand and she won't let go of him because _this_, more than _anything, __proves_ he's not a templar.

He doesn't want _sex_, the way most of the Circle's apprentices had sex all the time, whenever and wherever they could find a few moments of privacy, no matter how much the templars frowned on this sort of behavior and tried to shut it down when they saw it, because when you throw a bunch of teenagers together, lock them in a place with the same people for years, and no possibility of escape, what else could happen?

Anders, for one, had lots of meaningless sex and she'd had some too, but _never__ with__ each __other_ because it would hurt too much. They'd both know that worrying about her would have held him back from _any_ chance at escape, and staying in the Tower would have crushed him. She _refused_ be the reason he gave up. And she refused to get too close to him because when he _did_ get out, and leave her behind, even though it was _her __choice_, she couldn't afford for it to break her heart. She was broken enough already.

But she looks at Alistair, feels his touch against her body, and _she doesn't feel as broken_. She feels a thrill run through her as he fumbles with unbuckling her armor. She's honestly surprised at how right and natural it feels, like they were always supposed to do this. The _logical_ part of her brain that's getting easier to silence with every passing moment nags that this _should__ feel_ like some kind of betrayal, of Anders and of herself and of everything she knows about how the world is supposed to work. But it _doesn__'__t_ feel like a betrayal.

She _knows_ somehow, that Anders wouldn't want her to feel guilty because of him. _"__Go __live__ your__ life_," he'd told her. _"__Don__'__t __be__ scared.__"_

She sure as hell knows he'd never stopped to think about her when he was out "living life" in the brothels and haylofts and back-alleys of Ferelden, and she'd never blamed him for any of that.

And Anders isn't _here_ now. Alistair is.

"I guess... I just wanted to make sure you... really want to," Alistair stammers. He looks like he's ready to break and run at her command and pretend this never happened.

But underneath that, she sees the man that wants this, wants _her_. The man who kissed her when he _wasn__'_t stopping to thinking about all the reasons why he shouldn't. And the man who silently waited after she pushed him away, until she was _ready_ to come back to him. The man who _waits__ for __her __to __ask_, who stops in the middle of _undressing __her_ to _make__ sure._

She nods, pulling him closer to her, refusing to let him run away or change his mind.

"Of course I do, Alistair. I wouldn't have asked if I didn't."


	11. The Places You Have Come To Fear

They have to go back to the Circle Tower.

There is nowhere else that they can go.

"Not if we want the mages' help against the darkspawn, anyway," says Alistair. "And look on the bright side, it'll get at least some of them out of the Tower. That should make you a _little_ happy."

"Sure," she replies flatly. "At least they're out for a while. So what if it's to fight and die in your slave army, right?"

"You don't... _really_ mean that, do you, Rhyanon?"

She shrugs.

"Alistair, do you _listen_ to people talk, at all? _'I__ won't__ trust __lives __to__ your__ spells.'__ 'You__ need__ not __fear__ me __raising __a __rabble __against __you, __not __when__ you'll __be_ _of use._' Honestly... they won't take our help unless it's an absolute last resort, and when it _is_, they expect us to sacrifice ourselves happily on their front lines! They want us to _fight_, to protect _Ferelden_? What has Ferelden ever done for us? No one mourned the mages who died at Ostagar."

He opens his mouth and closes it again enough times that he's sure he looks like a drowning fish (weird expression right? Do fish _drown?_ not the _point!_)

Every time he thinks he has a handle on _just__ how__ badly_ mages are treated, she throws something like _this_ at him, something _else_ he should have thought of, but didn't.

"Sorry," she mutters.

"S'okay," he murmers back.

It's _not_ okay, she has _every __right_ to be mad at him. He spends every moment their together marveling at this miracle the Maker's given him, that even when she's mad at him, she _doesn__'__t__ hate__ him_.

She told him flat-out that the only reason she can find the strength to be here at all is because he's with her. He holds her and promises to never let her go. They spend the rest of the boat ride in unnatural silence. The dark fog rolling off the water gives a sense of... doom? Does doom have a feeling?

He tries to imagine growing up here, knowing you can't ever leave...

He suddenly feels much colder.

He lets his fingers tangle gently through Rhyanon's hair as they cut through the stormy waters.

It's been a long time since he's thought of her as young, or vulnerable, or as anything other than his slightly-scary friend and the woman he thinks he probably loves, but here... somehow she looks as though she's trying to disappear completely.

"They can't hurt you anymore," he whispers.

But he's _wrong_.

Whatever she'd feared finding here, neither of them had ever imagined it could be this.

"Doors are locked," Alistair says quietly. "Keeping people out, or in?"

Both.

As always.

Maybe it's because she's always seen this place as a prison that the lockdown conditions didn't raise the warnings in her head that they should've.

And he was looking to her for cues, although maybe he should've known better than that. She's not thinking clearly here, she _can__'__t_, and he knows it.

It's only once they've gotten past the terse reintroduction with Greagoir, when he tells her he's glad she's not dead and she tells him he doesn't really mean that and he _agrees_, that the real horror settles in.

"The Tower is no longer under our control," the Knight Commander tells them, and is that... _fear_ in his eyes?

Greagoir _can't_ lose control of the Tower. Greagoir _is_ control in the Tower.

"Demons and abominations stalk the halls."

_Demons __and __abominations._ Plural.

Just one little boy, _one_ demon, had nearly destroyed Redcliffe.

And these are trained mages.

How much dark power, how much death, could they unleash?

How could this _happen_?

"I have sent word to Denerim calling for the Rite of Annulment."

Alistair pales at the words, and Rhyanon notices immediately. It shakes her out of whatever state of shock she'd slipped into, and he winces, feeling even _worse_.

"What does that mean?" she asks quietly.

"You don't know?"

She shakes her head, and his heart sinks.

But why would she know? She'd been a Harrowed mage for barely half a day before Duncan took her to Ostagar. The templars have no reason to tell Tower apprentices about the existence of the rite, and _every_ reason to keep it hidden.

And she'd hated them enough already...

"It means the Circle's beyond saving," he says softly. "They'll kill the mages here. All of them."

_All__ of__ them_, from the First Enchanter down to the very youngest apprentices.

Five year old children who should be playing beneath their mothers' skirts will now instead be slaughtered for no reason other than their proximity to a crime they did not commit.

Every mage outside the Tower will be branded apostate, immediately, hunted down with all the might and authority of the Chantry. Even the ones who had left on official business, with the blessing of the Circle, who have been gone for months, since before Ostagar, and have no knowledge of what's happening here. Their ignorance will not save them.

Against a declared Rite, even the full power of the Grey Wardens is not always enough to shield the mages in their ranks. It means open conflict with the Chantry, and few Warden Commanders are willing to risk such a thing, especially during a Blight.

And there is _no_ backing for the Wardens in Ferelden now. The little protection Duncan's Conscription had given Rhyanon will not hold.

If Greagoir makes this decision, she is simply another Circle mage.

She'll die.

"We can't let that happen," Rhyanon insists, her voice shaking a little.

But she steps back, out of Alistair's reach, holding her staff out in a defensive stance.

She's afraid of him.

He'd thought they'd gotten past this a long time ago, thought he'd proven she could trust him.

"We _won't_," Alistair says, moving between her and Greagoir. His voice is soft but forceful as he stares the Knight Commander down. "We won't let that happen."


	12. Full Circle

"What are you doing here?" Wynne asks, though she sounds sort of... resigned to Rhyanon's presence.

Of course she'd come back to the Circle.

Don't they all?

"Have you... come to warn us?"

"Warn you of _what_?" Rhyanon asks sharply.

What could she possibly warn about that's worse than what's already here?

"The templars have barred the doors," Wynne clarifies. "They will only open them if they intend to attack us."

Well at least she's not ignorant _or_ stupid, but Rhyanon seriously wonders how she can discuss their imminent slaughter and sound so... _nice_ about it.

She doesn't particularly _like_ Wynne, although she loves that she was one of the only teachers - Irving being the other one - who insisted on everybody calling them by name because formal address made them feel too old and crotchety, even though they _were_ old and crotchety.

And she does owe her.

The Senior Enchanter's skill at healing was surpassed only by her inexhaustible patience when it came to teaching snot-nosed apprentices how to heal. Most of them hated the long, boring studying involved, when there was a perfectly good infirmary to take care of them if they ever got hurt.

And really, how likely was _that_? It's not like they were ever allowed to _do_ anything.

For most of them, spending most of their time in the library or in class like good little boys and girls, the greatest danger they faced was paper cuts.

Fire and lightning and ice were much more fun, easier, and surprisingly to some, actually far _less_ likely to kill you if you did it wrong.

Not to mention the overabundance of templar guards haunting the healing classes. Mages deliberately working with blood made them _very_ nervous.

But Rhyanon grew increasingly desperate to learn, because although Anders was much more naturally talented in that field than she could ever hope to be, when he really needed healing it was in the times he was in no way capable of doing it himself.

Not that she was able to do anything either, most of the time. Not unless the templars allowed it, and most wouldn't.

But knowing how to help even if she couldn't made her feel slightly better than absolutely useless, and spending long extra hours practicing her new skills helped take her mind off the reason for learning them.

And since joining the Wardens... every person she's pulled back from the edge of death after a battle with the darkspawn (or any of the other _things_ that attack them _all__ the __time_), including Alistair, more often than she wants to think about... they all probably owe Wynne too.

"Join with me to save this Circle," Wynne begs her.

And really she could just _order_ her to, if seniority among mages still matters at all now, but she doesn't, and Rhyanon finds herself respecting that.

But still, she's angry, she's tired, she's... _scared_, and that means she doesn't _feel_ like being nice, and she says things she doesn't really mean.

"Maybe I don't _want_ to," she snaps. "Maybe I'd rather see this place burn."

And Morrigan approves.

But one look at the little kids cowering behind Wynne, and Rhyanon knows she could never abandon this place.

Despite everything, it's the closest thing to a home she's ever had.

Morrigan _hates_ this place.

Morrigan hates everything, but Rhyanon has never seen her like _this_.

She's... twitchy, pacing, her fingers tapping against her staff as she scans the room looking for _something_ to fight.

Rhyanon immediately recognizes the signs of a mage about to lose control, because_ that's __her __too_, but to her credit, Morrigan is actually _very__ good_ at control.

She spits and screams about the mages who allow themselves to be caged here, but when Rhyanon points out that it should be her too, barring some incredible luck and a freaky old lady in the woods, she admits that if the templars had taken her, she'd have jumped off the Tower to her death.

She wouldn't have been the first one to make that choice.

The suicides are just more mages that no one mourns, or even _talks_ about.

Is Morrigan _really_ saying that these people should let the templars kill them all because they didn't choose to kill themselves? Either way, they're all dead.

How is that a _solution_?

"I'll help you," Rhyanon tells Wynne, and in return she gets a knowing smile, as though the older woman had already been sure of her answer. Maybe she had been, who knows? "It might be too late though. They've already asked for the... Rite of Annulment."

The words sound unfamiliar, _wrong_, even to say. How can such a thing exist, how could it have been planned for, enough to have a _name_? Who sat around talking about this?

What kind of person _makes_ these choices?

What kind of person makes these choices _necessary_?

_Demons and abominations stalk the halls._

And Wynne tells her that the one who started it, a man named Uldred who Rhyanon doesn't remember, had set this into motion _on__ purpose_.

"The Knight Commander probably assumes that we're all dead," Wynne tells her, still sounding _ridiculously__ calm_, like she's talking about gardening or something.

"Or _hopes_ we are," Rhyanon mutters. "He's the one who locked the damn doors."

What if she'd never come back here?

Then he'd just wait, until there really _were_ no survivors. He'd _make__ sure_ there were no survivors, and then he'd just walk away.

No guilt, no regret. Just doing his job.

Just protecting the _innocent __people_ of Ferelden. Even when it means slicing open the throat of a crying child.

Because they're not innocent people. Not when they're born with magic, cursed by the Maker himself.

For most of them, it starts with nightmares.

Rhyanon wasn't nearly as shaken by the archdemon dreams as Alistair expected, because she'd been having them all her life.

At four or five years old, you wake up screaming in the night, hearing voices in your head that you can't understand.

A couple of months later, a couple of _years_, if you're lucky, the other signs come, usually when you're angry, or afraid. Sparks of fire or electricity, enough for someone to recognize what you are, and turn you in to the Chantry.

Usually it's someone in your own family that does it. They watch the templars take you, and then they pretend that you never existed at all.

And they might as well be _right_, because you can't belong to them anymore.

You're trapped inside a tower, and one day, someone will lock the doors so you can't get out, and wait for you to die.

You start having bad dreams, and then the bad dreams turn real.

"When Greagoir sees that we yet live, I trust he will tell his men to back down," Wynne says, and Rhyanon notices that she is starting to sound a little more desperate. As though maybe if she says this out loud she might be able to convince herself that it could be true. "He is not unreasonable."

Rhyanon_ really__ wants_ to disagree with this assessment, but she _can't_.

Because he did give her _something_ to cling to, the tiniest sliver of hope.

"He said he'll call off the Rite if Irving is alive," she admits.

"Then lets go find him," Wynne declares.

She takes Rhyanon's hand as the barrier shimmers and collapses.


	13. Don't You Remember What It Was Like?

The first rooms they walk through are mercifully quiet, empty.

They wander through the apprentice dorms, and Alistair's surprised by how... _familiar_ they look.

He doesn't even have to close his eyes, and he's immediately transported to the Denerim Chantry, a room full of loud, roughhousing boys that didn't stay loud for long, not when the clerics and brothers were around. The templars were _mildly_ better, because at least they understood the truth; the boys in Alistair's class were being trained as _soldiers_, not priests, and soldiers understand the value of morale, and a good laugh every now and again.

He swears these bunks may actually be the_ same __ones_. He wonders if the thin pillows and scratchy sheets would feel the same, smell the same...

"Which one was yours?" he whispers to Rhyanon.

She points vaguely to a corner of the room. Away from the door, pressed against the wall.

Good choice.

Then no one can see you trying not to cry, as a thin trail of blood runs down the back of your leg at the place where the cane had cut particularly deep.

And you should fix it, you should _care_, but honestly, why bother?

The welts and bruises are pretty much a permanent feature on your body now. The ones that don't come from the beatings will come from combat training or from the fights that _result_ in the beatings.

Why was he _always_ the one who got in trouble?

Other people got into fights too, all the time. Other people _started_ the fights.

But they were nobles' sons, most of them, and their families came to visit every now and then, or at least exchanged letters, and if they were ever "mistreated" someone would come into the Chantry and yell at the Grand Cleric for a while.

No one cared about what happened to a bastard boy who ran his smart mouth all the time.

_Was_ he being mistreated?

He has no idea. This is pretty much how he's always been treated.

They were _learning_ how to fight, with _swords_ and _armor_ (too bad he couldn't wear the stupid armor _all__the__time_, he'd like to see them try to give him a thrashing then).

How could the same instructors who admitted that they appreciated his talents at defending himself decide later on in the _same__day_ that doing that meant he deserved to be punished?

"What happens to a mage who tries to break from the Tower?" Rhyanon had pressed him once, a long time ago.

He wonders what would happen to a templar who tried.

That had never come up.

He thinks if he'd ended up here he may have been the first to find out.

Would it have been a death sentence for him too?

Doubtful. That would be a waste of more than ten years spent training and feeding and clothing him, for one thing.

Also, it might be considered bad publicity to kill your own people (unless it's slowly, with lyrium, of course, and no one knows about that).

Would they throw a fellow templar into their own dungeon cells?

This place is awful. He squeezes Rhyanon's hand.

When they fight the demons and the blood mages he can't help but feel a little bit thrilled; this _is_ what he was made to do, and he's _good_ at it.

He tries not to think about Connor, he tries not to think about _Rhyanon_, this could just as easily be her that his sword is slicing through.

Not-thinking-about-it works reasonably well until one of them, a teenage girl (It's _insane_ how young she is. Why isn't she on the other side of the barrier with the other kids?) drops her staff and begs them not to kill her. Is she _crying_?

"Don't you remember what it was like here?" the girl whispers, pulling at Rhyanon's sleeve. "What it felt like, with them always watching..."

"I know," Rhyanon says sadly.

_Of__ course__ she__ remembers_, Alistair thinks. She's never forgotten.

But he stares at the broken bodies littering the floor, listens to the screams, and wonders how anybody could ever think this was the way to make it better.


	14. This Place Drains You of Everything

She learned a long time ago not to believe anything that shows up in the Fade, but that doesn't make it easier.

It's not that she can't tell it isn't real.

The real world isn't this weird sort-of-green color.

Nothing feels like anything here; it's like everything she tries to touch repels her with some sort of soft, fuzzy field. Like the shields she can put up to magically throw back attacks, but over _everything_.

But somehow, still, _it__ feels __like __it __should __be __real_.

The voices whisper in her head, and they sound perfectly reasonable, and when they tell her that they know what she wants, they're _right_, even though she fights them.

"Wouldn't you like to just lay down and forget about all this? Leave it all behind."

_Yes_.

No.

She tried that once. Leaving it behind doesn't mean forgetting it.

"Why do you fight?"

Because she _has __to._

"It seems only war and death will satisfy you."

Apparently.

What the _hell_ does that say about her?

She stalks her way through the world of dreams and nightmares, and she's looking for exactly one thing.

And it's not the way out.

It's Alistair.

When she finds him, he's _happy_.

And it's not a mask, a joking cover because he doesn't want to dwell on the things he's actually feeling, it's _real_.

He's laughing, waiting for a real meal made just for him, not trail rations scarfed down between attacks.

He's surrounded by playing children.

But they're his sister's kids, not his. Not hers.

What Alistair _wants_ more than anything else in the world is family. And she can't give that to him either.

And to save his life, she has to destroy this for him.

Because while he's happy, the demons are eating at his soul, piece by tiny piece, and if she lets him stay she will lose him forever.

Alistair doesn't have the training that she does. He doesn't know the pathways of the Fade because he's been walking them since he was a child. It's hard enough for her to have to remind herself, over and over again, that this is _not_ the real world. It's hard enough to fight against this place even when she knows she has to try.

Alistair may not even know he's in danger. He's just dreaming right? Dreams can't hurt you. When you die in a dream, you just wake up again.

Except when you don't.

Thank the Maker he'd gotten through as much of the templar training as he did (who'd have ever thought she'd say _that_?). She's almost certain that those abilities; to resist magical attacks, to build a fortress in your mind to block out everything, are the only things keeping him from being ripped apart in here.

It's not just templars who can learn these things. Most soldiers do.

But she tries not to think about it because she knows Alistair started templar training at ten years old, and she _knows_ how they teach mental fortitude.

They hurt you a lot until it just doesn't _matter_ anymore.

It's instinct to fight back physically when someone hurts you physically, and they let you get away with that for a while. But they're still bigger than you, it's not much of a fight.

And then you're exhausted and bleeding and bruised and curled up to protect yourself as much as you can, and there's a ward up so you _can't_ cast a shield, you can't heal yourself, you can't even grasp for your magic even though you can _always_ touch magic, and not being able to feels like someone ripped your heart out.

And the attacks and the hits still keep coming, so now you have no choice at all but to build that wall up in your mind and huddle behind it, nothing exists anymore except you. And you survive.

_That's_ mental fortitude.

That's what gets you through the Harrowing, that's what gets you through seeing your home ripped apart by demons.

That's what lets you stand by watching while they do the same thing to the best friend you ever had, because the only other choice is getting yourself _and__ him_ killed.

She wonders why all of her companions have been locked in their own personal cages, where insidious lies creep and tell you that everything would just be so much _easier_ if you just let yourself be happy, but she hasn't (That thing with Weisshaupt, with Duncan, didn't count. She never knew that place or that man, not really).

Maybe there really _isn't_ anything that would make her happy.

Instead, she's left alone to try to fix the things that can't be fixed.

Do even the demons know that these are the things that break her?

"This place drains you of everything," Niall tells her. "Hope. Feeling. Life."

And she can't help but wonder if he's talking about the Fade or the Tower.


	15. Broken

They're out of the Fade, but the real world at this moment doesn't _feel_ like any less of a nightmare.

She stumbles through the halls, thankful that even though everything's _different_ now, broken and bloody (_Good_, part of her thinks. _Now __they're __not __lying__ anymore_), she could still find her way around with her eyes closed.

She finds Niall's body, just like he'd said, and she knows she should feel at least a little bit sad about it, but she can't summon the energy.

_"Death __is __all __around__ us,"_ Wynne had told her in the Fade. Not _everything_ they said there was a lie.

They head for the Harrowing Chamber.

Figures.

If you're going to summon demons into the Tower, may as well do it in the place where the templars have done it for hundreds of years.

But before they can get there, she finds herself frozen at the sight of a templar, trapped behind a hazy purple shimmer, a magical cage.

Somehow it's this image, this reversal of everything she's used to in this place, that disturbs her more than anything else she's yet seen here.

He looks up, and his eyes widen, and he nearly trips over himself stumbling backwards away from her as far as the barrier will allow.

_"You."_

And she realizes she knows this one.

Cullen, the shy, stammering, nervous templar (who had flat out_ told__ her_ that he was the one holding the sword at her throat during her Harrowing).

The best thing she can say about him is that if he'd killed her at least he might have felt bad about it.

Of course, that was before Greagoir labeled her a blood mage (and when it comes down to her word against the Knight Commander's she knows _exactly_ who Cullen is obligated to listen to). He might have felt bad about it, but he'd still have killed her without hesitation, even before... this.

Except... he stares directly at her as he rants and mumbles about the demons torturing him with the one thing he could never have.

His eyes are wild, and she thinks she catches the word "infatuation."

She really, _really_ shouldn't be hearing this.

She _doesn't__ want __to__ know_ about this.

She wonders if it's true, wonders how she never noticed.

"They caged us like animals," he chokes out. "Looked for ways to break us... and there was nothing I could do."

She remembers crying as Anders bled, dozens of lash marks cutting deep across his skin, knowing she could heal him, take his pain away, _except__ they __wouldn't __let __her._

She remembers holding a pillow over her head in the middle of the night, squeezing her eyes shut and trying as hard as she could _not __to __listen._

She remembers Jowan slicing open his own wrist, sacrificing his best friends and his only chance at love and the only home he'd ever known rather than let them steal his magic and his soul.

"Gee," she says bitterly. "I wonder what that would be like."

"Rhyanon, _don't_," Alistair whispers.

"He wants to kill us all!" she snaps.

The Cullen she remembers actually reminds her a bit of Alistair, but _she__ can't__ take __his__ side __on __this_.

And besides that... Alistair's not a templar, not really, but Cullen was _there_, through _everything_.

And she's supposed to feel _sorry_ for him now?

She walks away without a second glance, leaving him to his tortures, his prison.

He deserves it.


	16. Your Eyes Open

Bile rises up in Rhyanon's throat as she watches this twisted man (Demon. Has to be. She refuses to believe that _anybody_ would do this by choice) create more of his own kind.

The mage - the man - collapses to the ground, gurgling, choking, spitting... and dying.

When he rises, he is not a human being anymore.

_Abomination._

She's heard the word a thousand times, so much that it has lost all meaning, but now she understands it with new clarity: something whose very existence _should_ be hated and feared.

This is what the world sees, when they see her.

"A mage is but the larval form of something greater," Uldred tells her.

But this is _not_ what she is.

This is what she refuses to become.

"How can you hope to resist this?" Uldred purrs. "_You?_ Do you think I have not heard your story, _Rhyanon__ Amell?_" he whispers in her ear, and she feels sick.

She twists away from him, pushes out of his grasp. "You know what the Chantry teaches and _you__ know __the __truth_. They cannot contain us. Surely you, of all of us, must understand the need to resist, to _fight_... and I even have the First Enchanter on my side, don't I? Say hello to your star pupil, Irving."

He is limp, bound by weaves of magic she can feel but not see, his life is draining from him.

And Rhyanon swears her heart stops beating for a moment, but all she can think is, _he's __alive_. Still. At least for a little bit longer.

And as long as they can keep him that way, the Rite of Annulment will not go through, and however few mages there are _left_ at least will not be heartlessly eliminated.

She thinks of the fear in Petra's eyes, as she tried to put on a brave smile, to convince herself and Rhyanon and Wynne that she had any power at all to keep the innocent children safe.

She thinks of the little boy whose name she doesn't even _know_, who had promised her that he'd be okay because everyone knew that boys were better at magic than girls.

They _have_ to keep Irving alive. No matter what.

Irving shakes his head. "Stop him," he whispers weakly. "He's building an army. He'll destroy the templars..."

And Uldred laughs, a bone-chilling cackle. "Of _course_ that's what I'm doing! Will you stop me? Don't you _want __to_ destroy the templars too?"

"No!" she spits.

_Yes,_ some insistent nagging whisper tugs at her, tickling for attention at the back of her brain.

She forces it down.

_Not like this._

He tells her to fight, and she lights up, a scary, wicked grin on her face.

Oh yes, she'll fight. It's what she does.

_They_ fight.

Wynne fights to protect the Circle.

Morrigan fights... just because. Because she's not the type of woman to go down quietly, and she may be an apostate, but she understands full well what it means for a mage to be enslaved by a demon, and she won't be enslaved by _anything_.

And Alistair fights for her.

They've gotten _good_ at this, working as a team, shielding each other from the worst things the world can throw at them, and coming out ahead.

Irving's coughing breaks the silent aftermath.

"I'm too old for this," he mutters. The bonds have broken. He's okay.

Rhyanon helps him to his feet, and its _eerie_ how easy it is to fall back into this pattern, where he leads and she follows and it's like she never left.

And she hides behind him as he confronts Knight Commander Greagoir, and speaks for her, again.

In his quiet, forceful way he bypasses Cullen's angry, fearful insistence that they have already called for Annulment and they can't undo that now.

"I will accept Irving's assurance that all is well," Greagoir announces.

_No __it__ isn't!_ she wants to scream.

How can they possibly think it's acceptable to just go back to the way things were before?

They tell her that they'll help against the darkspawn, as though she's supposed to care about that now.

The way Greagoir says it, it's implied that once she leaves this place he never wants to see her again. She can't say the idea is entirely unappealing.

She's clearly not the _only_one thinking that, because Wynne manages to get herself attached to _Rhyanon__'__s_ mission (and _that_ still feels wrong, that she should be considered a _leader_ to any of these people).

She walks that fine line they all learn after a lifetime in the Tower - making it look like they're asking permission from the templars who _always_ have the power to say no.

But she's been here _forever_, she makes her own decisions and _everybody_ knows it, so Greagoir doesn't even pretend to turn her down.

The Knight-Commander begins to walk away, but then he pauses.

"Irving," he says carefully. "It _is_ good to have you back."

"I'm sure we'll be back at one another's throats in no time," Irving replies dryly, and Rhyanon can't help but smile.

He'll keep them safe.

It's what he does.

He can't be everywhere at once, she _knows_ that. She'd _hated_ him sometimes, for not stopping Greagoir and his templars from taking advantage of their power in any one of several horrible ways.

But she'd never blamed him, because she knows what it's like to shut things out, to close your eyes, because it's easier than fighting.

And Irving's eyes are open now.

Rhyanon waits until most of them have already turned their attention toward _leaving_, checking their gear and trying to forgot about the very real nightmares they just fought through, before following Irving.

Alistair stays close on her heels. She didn't ask him to, but she's not surprised. And where once she would've insisted on doing this alone, now... now she doesn't want to push him away, not ever.

She catches the First Enchanter just before he leaves the main hall, and he watches her with his trademark observant smile. _Of__ course_ he knows what she wants, what she's about to ask.

"He's... I won't say alright, but he's safe enough, Rhyanon." Irving tells her, before she has to say anything at all. "Probably safer than any of the rest of us. The wards down there have _always_ kept him well-shielded."

She knows better than to ask if he can let her take him. It was impossible when she wanted Duncan to do it and there's no way Greagoir would let it happen now.

She wants _so __badly_ to go see him, to _make __sure_ for herself that he _is_ still alive.

But she knows he is. She still touches him in her dreams.

And she knows she can't. It isn't fair to him, for one thing. To _see__ her_ flaunting the freedom he's denied. She'd never do that to him.

"Just watch out for him, okay?" she asks, not even _bothering_ to hide the tears she's crying. She doesn't _have __to_ keep her feelings locked down anymore.

Irving nods. "Always."


	17. The One Good Thing

They go as far as they can go from the Tower, but it's not far enough. You can see the thing from _miles_ away, too far to walk in a day, and Rhyanon is exhausted in more ways than physically, though every time he asks her if she wants to stop she says no.

Finally, darkness forces the issue. He doesn't want to twist his ankle tripping over some tree stump or something just because she's looking for an escape she can't get.

He makes her come to their tent earlier than usual that night because he hates the way she can't look away from the dark shadow in the sky.

"Do you... want to talk about it?" he finally asks, feeling like he _has __to_, even though it's obvious in everything from the way she carries herself to the dark look in her eyes that she _really __doesn__'__t_.

He of course wonders about that conversation she'd let him witness between her and the First Enchanter, he _knows_ it has to be about her friend (and it's equally obvious from the way she's acting that whatever they'd had it was more than simple friendship), locked in a dungeon cell, and she couldn't do a thing for him... no wonder she can't stop looking over her shoulder.

He digs around in his pack for one particular thing, because he's been waiting for the right time to give it to her. It's slightly crushed, but he's kept it safe. He holds it tightly in his grip, knowing that now clearly _isn__'__t _the right time, but he just wants to make sure it's still safe.

"What's that?" she whispers, sneaking up behind him and he _barely_ manages not to jump out of his skin.

"It's... a flower," he says, hoping he sounds as cool as he hopes he does. "A rose, specifically."

"I know, I can see that." Though she did _ask_. "I guess I more meant... why've you been carrying a rose around? You don't really seem the... flowery type."

"I picked it up in Lothering," he tells her.

And she's impressed, he can tell. She looks again, studying it carefully. It's dry, for sure, but he hasn't let it crumble or rot or anything.

"I just thought... it was... _beautiful_. This one beautiful thing surrounded by despair. And I couldn't let the darkspawn destroy it."

"And you've had it all this time?"

"Yeah, I... I thought you might want it."

He's blushing.

"It kinda reminds me of you. I... _Maker_, that sounded... I sound like an idiot. Let me start over."

Rather than let him start at all, she pulls him close and kisses him.

And they lay there in the tent, and she _talks_ to him. It _still_ astounds him that she cares at all about anything about him.

"So how _did_ you come to be such an expert on flowers?"

"Oh, I loved the gardens at the Chantry."

At first she thinks he's playing with her, being sarcastic again, but he's actually serious, and after a few moments she catches on.

"Really? _Why_?"

He shrugs. "Because they were outside, mostly."

She _immediately_ understands that, tells him the Tower had gardens too, but they were for necessary food, herbs and vegetables, not flowers, and the templars hounded their steps, every minute they were there.

He realizes as she says it that when she says "templars" it might be the first time it's _clear_ that she's talking about something separate from him. That knowledge fills him with a feeling of warmth and... _love_ and maybe this _is_ the right time, even though she snuck up on him.

"Also, they were... pretty, I guess?" he says. "I don't know. I used to sneak in there, really early in the morning, because I knew the other guys would never let me hear the end of it if they knew that's where I was going. Got caught a lot, but that's okay. After a while, they left me alone about it, the brothers. I guess the Grand Cleric told them to lay off me, because really, what could I do with _flowers_? Who knows, maybe the old bint _did_ have a soft spot in her."

The one good thing surrounded by despair. And he _still_ manages to stumble into it, somehow.

"I love you, Alistair," she says softly.

It's the first time she's said it out loud.

He clears his throat and puts his arm around her. "I, um... I love you too, Rhyanon."

He picks up the flower from where he'd left it, near his sword, and tries to give it to her, but she won't take it.

"Thank you," she says, closing her fingers over his. "It's a nice thought, _really_. But I want you to keep it."


	18. Just Another Mage in a Dungeon Cell

She's had a lifetime of fear and a brief hope of freedom, but she should have known it would only be a matter of time before she became just another mage in a dungeon cell.

She wonders how it could have all gone so wrong, so fast.

Because she's an _idiot_, that's why!

She didn't think things through, she _trusted_ people when she shouldn't have.

She's a mage, she was purposely _removed_ from the circles of nobility, she knows nothing about them, she doesn't understand the first thing about the games they play.

In the Tower, it's easy.

Mage or Templar.

Locked doors, explicit threats, everyone's eyes on one another, all the time.

It's impossible to keep secrets in such a place.

She has no business playing politics.

Even Alistair had known that following Arl Eamon to Denerim was a bad idea.

Why didn't she _listen_, what was she trying to do?

Does it matter anymore?

Anora betrayed them, left them in the clutches of Arl Howe, who is on Loghain's side... it's all so confusing, she can't pull the strings apart.

It doesn't really matter.

All that matters is that they want her dead.

But... they haven't killed her yet. Why? _Why?_

They are keeping her alive, but they haven't touched her, haven't asked a single question.

She doesn't know anything that they would want to know anyway.

She doesn't _care_ about who holds the throne in Ferelden. She doesn't even really care about the darkspawn. She never did.

All she wants is release. If they're planning to kill her, why haven't they done it yet?

It sure felt like that's what they wanted when she was surrounded by guards with sharpened steel in the Arl's estate.

If this is how it's all going to end, what good was it to ever leave the Tower at all?

Just different cages, different jailers...

The walls are closing in.

She shivers in her smallclothes, huddled in a tiny ball against the dank, hard stone wall, swallowed by the darkness of Fort Drakon.

Everything smells like blood. She can't tell if it's hers.

Sharp cold metal bites into her wrists, bound behind her back.

The soft blue glow of the lyrium twined into the cuffs is too gentle to be the signature of something as brutal as the enchantment they are powering.

It's like someone is driving a spike through her skull. She can barely remember her name, much less summon the concentration required to work even the simplest spell.

She can't sleep through the pain, even the thought of food (though it's rarely offered) is enough to make her feel like vomiting.

With the mage-cuffs on, her torture is continuous, but at least it's better than the threat to cut off her hands that they've not yet acted on.

Probably because at least one person in this place knows more about magic than the average commoner, enough to realize that it wouldn't do a thing to prevent her from casting.

Maybe Alistair had told them.

Would they believe him? Would they care?

_Alistair..._

She hasn't seen him in... days? Has it been days yet?

She knows better than to hope he is still alive.

She doesn't remember closing her eyes, but when she opens them again, she's not alone.

"I was worried about you," Alistair whispers. She crawls over to him, and he holds her. _His_ hands are free.

That doesn't seem right, but she shrugs it off. She _has_ to trust him.

She always has to trust him, without him... her fingers grasp for his.

"Shh, Rhyanon," he soothes, as though she were a child. "Shh, it's alright. It's alright now, I promise."

She feels tears falling. She lets them.

"You believe me, don't you?"

She nods. "I thought..." her voice breaks. "I was so scared, Alistair. Are you alright?"

"I've been worse," he tells her calmly.

_Worse? __How?_ How could _anything_ be worse than this?

"You make me better," he explains, as if reading her thoughts.

And she nods through her tears, because she understands. He makes her better too.

She's so happy to see him, but she's afraid too.

Her thoughts are sluggish, slow to respond, but nagging at her is the idea that this must be some sort of trick, a trap.

_Why would they give him back to her?_

"I like your outfit," he teases, low and quiet, and she can't help but smile.

Who _knows_ what they'd done to him, she doesn't _want_ to know, but he's still able to joke.

"I like yours too," she replies, carefully trying to sound like she's not crying. As though he can't tell...

She could stay this way forever, wrapped up in his arms.

But she can't, she knows she can't, they wouldn't let her, they'll just take him away again... How long will this last? Not long enough.

They always take everything away from her. Unless she runs first. Anders taught her that.

"Alistair," she says softly. "Let's get out of here."

He nods, immediately snapping into soldier-mode. "Hope you have a plan."

She doesn't.

She doesn't know how she's managed to fool everyone into thinking she did for so long.

_Is desperation a plan?_

It'll have to be. It's all they've got.


	19. Always Follow, Never Lead

"I can't be king!" Alistair insists, _again_. "I can't be a leader."

"What are you talking about, Alistair?" Rhyanon asks gently.

Well at she's _listening_ to him, unlike Arl Eamon, who, as always, just ignores everything he ever says because it gets in the way of the decision he's already made. "Of course you can. There's no one I trust more."

He shakes his head.

No one wants him.

No matter what he tries to do, it's never the right thing. The choices he makes always lead to only one thing: pain. The Chantry said they couldn't teach him anything? Liars. They taught him a lot. They taught him how to take hit after hit and pretend it doesn't matter. He's not afraid of getting hurt anymore, he knows he can handle it.

But it only _works_ if he's the only one getting hurt.

He's knows how to be a good soldier, he's finally figured _that_ out, at least. Good soldiers _follow_. Follow your commander, follow orders.

Always follow, never lead.

It works for him.

He _can't_ be the one in charge. Who would listen to the little bastard boy?

No one, that's who.

It's obvious in the hardened eyes of everyone watching him at the Landsmeet.

There are whispers, the same as always (_bastard,__gutter __rat, __doesn't __belong __here_), but there are new ones too: _traitor_ and _usurper_.

And those whispers are _dangerous_. They could get him killed. They could get _Rhyanon_ killed.

He _told_ her not to do this, he doesn't _want_ it, but she'd stupidly thrown in her support with Eamon's claim and (he hates to admit that Anora could be right about _anything_, but she's right about this) she'd done it with absolutely no subtlety.

There is yelling all around him, most of it coming from Loghain, but he ignores most of it, and looks for the real dangers under the bluster (Chantry taught him that too - see, turns out the Chantry is _very_ educational).

And beneath the screams and shouting, he sees that Loghain has already made his decision, and no one else has realized it yet. He swallows hard.

"I charge Eamon, Alistair, and this Warden (_Rhyanon_, he thinks. Honestly, she has a name, and they have to know it by now. _Really_? This is what he's concerned about at this moment?) with treason. Take these traitors outside to await execution."

And the thing is, Loghain's _right_. What he's doing _is_ treason.

He's been told this from the start. He's a lowborn commoner, not in line for the throne, not ever, no matter what. If he ever tried, it would rip apart the nation (all his choices lead to pain).

But Loghain was a traitor first, and he _refuses_ to let him win.

And he refuses to let them kill Rhyanon, not when he promised her he'd protect her. She's been running from an execution order for so long, there's nothing she fears more.

She deserves so much better than this.

And _somebody's_ got to stop the Blight, and they're the only ones who can.

He squeezes her hand and they both ready for a fight, and Eamon's voice booms in the background. "We will not let them take us!"

Alistair is somewhat surprised to see that almost half of the Landsmeet's nobles stand with him.

And they fight.

He loses himself in it, the way he always does, and for a moment it doesn't matter that he's in a Denerim estate slicing his way through people who should be his allies. When he's in the heat of battle it feels exactly the same as if he were out on a field cutting through swaths of darkspawn.

He has absolutely no idea what's going on, whether they stand any chance at all of winning this. He focuses on nothing except himself, his sword and his shield. Well, and his usual habit of keeping tabs on Rhyanon, making sure she's alright. She's smart enough to know not to get into the thick of it, but Loghain has _so__ many __men_ here, there seems to be a neverending supply of them, rushing in and surrounding them all, no matter how many they drive back.

But they're still fighting.

"Enough!" The voice is _still_ enough to make him freeze, to stop what he's doing immediately, no matter what. Especially in that mood.

He sneaks a guilty glance up at the balcony, where the Revered Mother looks stern and impatient and _get __a__ grip, __Alistair!__ You're __an__ adult __now, __a__ Warden, __you're __trying __to __be __king__!_

"There will be no further bloodshed in the Landsmeet," she declares. It is not a request.

Alistair glances at all the bodies littering the floor, the slicks of blood, listens to the moans and sighs of the seriously injured and dying, and he tries not to snicker incredulously.

_Typical_.

Too little, too late, that's the Chantry he knows.

He puts himself in front of Rhyanon because he does _not_ like the way the Grand Cleric is looking at her.

Well, what did they expect, attacking a mage?

Would they hand a soldier a sword, then threaten his life and expect him not to use it? He glances down at the weapon in his hand. Clearly not.

Bloody hypocrites. Where do they think she learned to fight anyway? It was _their_ Circle that taught her.

They call for a duel, and he smiles.

He's been waiting for this a long time.

He has absolutely no idea if he can win this thing. Loghain's known as one of the best, possibly _the __best_ swordsmen in Ferelden.

But he knows he has to try.

And somehow, he manages to come out ahead. In the old days, they said winning one of these things meant you were touched by the Maker's favor. He wonders if that's still true.

Just before he dies, Loghain coughs, and smiles. "Good. There is some of Maric in you after all."

Alistair shrugs. He wouldn't know.


	20. Not How It's Supposed To Be

He wants to talk about the future.

They never do that.

The future's not really something Grey Wardens get anything out of dwelling on.

But now... he's not just a Grey Warden. He's king of Ferelden. Because she wanted him to be. She knew he deserved it, it's his birthright, all he had to do was claim it.

But she's still a mage. She didn't think it through, because they _don't_. They don't think about the future.

"Magic exists to serve man, never to rule over him." Not even if she's not ruling at all, just joining herself to the man who is. She can't stay with him, not in any way that's honest or sanctioned or blessed by the Maker (not that she particularly _trusts_ the Maker's blessing, but he does).

That's what he wants to talk about.

"Rhyanon, as king, I'll have to have an heir. The Theirin line can't die with me, that's the whole _point_."

"What are you... Alistair, _I'm_ still perfectly capable of bearing your child."

He shakes his head. "No, you're not."

Her eyes narrow. "Because I'm a mage."

He pauses, chews on his lower lip the way he does when he's nervous, or deep in thought. "No," he finally admits. "Honestly, I wasn't even thinking about _that_ part of it. It's because you're a Warden."

"Wardens don't have kids?"

"Not with each other. The darkspawn taint... corrupted blood from even one parent, it's... _not__ recommended_. I wouldn't at all, except..."

"The heir thing."

"Yeah," he says solemnly. "The heir thing." He pulls her close to him, and holds her for a moment. "I don't want this, Rhyanon. I told you that. I never wanted this. I want _you_."

"I'm not planning to give you up, idiot," she replies sharply, but inside, her heart is breaking. If he decides to leave her, what can she do about it?

Nothing.

They can take _everything_ away from her, always, and she can't do a thing about it.

Even this. The _one __thing_ she thought was hers, the one thing that's kept her sane through this whole stupid Blight.

She's just going to be thrown away again, left in some hole somewhere to be forgotten because her presence is _inconvenient_.

She wants to scream.

She keeps her feelings carefully masked. Just like always.

It's worse if you lose control. It hurts more.

She can't stop the tears from pooling in her eyes though. She kicks at the base of the wall. Alistair notices.

He knows how she feels.

"You don't think... I'll have to have a wife, Rhyanon. It can't be you. There'd be a revolt, we might as well just _hand_ Anora the throne. And what you want, what you're asking... it isn't fair. To you or to me or to her, whoever it ends up being."

"This is _not_ how it's supposed to be!" she does scream. Forget control. It's Alistair. He'll know if she's lying anyway. "If I knew you were just going to walk away from me the _minute_ you got the crown, I _would_ have supported Anora!"

"Rhyanon, I _don't__ know_ what I'm supposed to do here!"

He does, actually.

He knows exactly what he's _supposed_ to do, and it would crush him. And he could never ever do it.

He can't break her heart. She's so broken already, and he's supposed to be her protector. He promised her he'd keep her safe, no matter what.

"Don't leave me," she begs him.

"I won't," he swears, combing his fingers through her hair because he knows it calms her. "I won't, Rhyanon, I promise. I'll... figure something out."

"Maybe the archdemon will just kill us all," she says bitterly. "Problem solved."


	21. It's Not How You Die, It's How You Live

He still lets other people tell him what to do.

She thought that was supposed to stop when he became king, but he waits for orders from Arl Eamon and Riordan, and when they tell him to go to Redcliffe he gives an apologetic little shrug and looks to her.

He should know by now that she doesn't have any more idea what she's doing than he does and she's getting sick of faking it.

At least he's decided to ignore whatever the people might think about the two of them (_for __now_, a little voice whispers in her head. _He's __not__ the__ king,__ yet,__ he's__ still __a __Warden_). She shrugs the nagging doubt away.

No point in dwelling on it. More pressing concerns.

They get to Redcliffe to find it already surrounded by darkspawn.

She's one step behind, a little slow, a little late.

She always is.

And they tell her the horde is marching for Denerim, and she almost screams. They were _just__ there!_

The days they spent, getting to Redcliffe, awkward camps and tired walking because everything's changing, everything's ending, and they can't find the old ways of joking and singing anymore... it was all a waste.

People are going to die, because she listened to the wrong advice, she trusted someone else when he said he knew what he was talking about, that all signs pointed to a darkspawn assault on Redcliffe.

It gets worse.

The archdemon has made its appearance (but she knew that already, she hears it screaming in her dreams, loud and painful, worse every night, and she sees in Alistair's eyes that he feels it too).

The army _has_ to go to Denerim, there is no choice. But even on a forced march... they can't make it in two days.

It usually takes five. They will lose men to exhaustion before they even _get_ to the battle.

And Riordan says quietly, out of earshot of Arl Eamon or anyone else, that he needs to speak to her and to Alistair, and he will not meet their eyes when he asks them to find him in his guest room that night. And when they do, he tells them the truth that a part of them had always known but refused to admit: there is no coming back from this war, not for them.

"One of us will have to die," Riordan tells them. And she can't help but hope it's _him_, because he even says he wants it. Alistair's told her what happens to Wardens after too many years. She hopes it's him, but she knows... if it's not him, it'll have to be her. Because Alistair's _king_, he can't die.

But she's surprisingly... content, with the knowledge.

_"It's__ not __how __you __die, __it's __how __you __live."_ Duncan's words.

He was there with her at the beginning of this, he's the _reason_ she's not dead already.

And she'd hated everything about him at first, thought he was just like everyone else in the world who only wanted to use her.

Alistair's the one that told her that Duncan saved his life, made her _believe__ it_ that he'd saved her too, given her a second chance because she _deserved _one.

She'd been running from a death sentence for _so__ long_, one she _didn't_ deserve, one forced on her by other people judging her, knowing _nothing_, ready to kill her out of nothing more than fear.

But this is different.

This death sentence she accepts, she claims as her own. It's not a sentence, it's a sacrifice.

Her life for the lives of all of Ferelden.

And she knows that they won't mourn her, because she's still a mage, a Tower slave.

But it's still worth it.

They tell her to get some sleep. Her mind is buzzing, she can't sleep, there's no way. Anybody who thinks she could is _crazy_.

They've given her a private room, separate from Alistair, to keep up appearances or something, but she doesn't care. She doesn't plan to stay there.

She only goes in to grab some of her things, but she freezes when she sees Morrigan, waiting there, sitting on the bed with that slightly bored "this whole world is beneath me" expression on her face.

"Don't you have your own room?"

"I have your way out," is the response, cryptic as ever. "The loop in your hole."

"You can start making sense any time now?"

She speaks of "old magic" (_blood__ magic,__ dark__ magic_), but it can keep her _and_ Alistair alive.

She tells her to talk to Alistair, to ask, but Rhyanon shakes her head.

Sex with Morrigan, to create... what? A darkspawn abomination?

Even if she _wanted_ to do this, even if she thought it was a good idea, and she _doesn't_, she could never ask him to participate in something like this.

It would mean turning his back on everything that makes him who he is.

It would kill everything they ever had.

This is no loophole. This changes nothing.

"No deal."

Morrigan flutters and spits angrily, and leaves.

_It's not how you die. It's how you live._


	22. Let Me Be Your Shield

The forced march to Denerim. Wave after wave of darkspawn. Fire and bodies littering the streets. This is _war_, and Rhyanon hates it.

Everyone looks at her and Alistair to know what to do, commander and king, but that's not who they are.

They're _just_ Rhyanon and Alistair, just faking it, just scared.

She knows she's not a hero.

This isn't what she _wants_.

She wants nothing more than to curl up under her blankets in camp and sleep for something like a month. She's drinking lyrium like water just to stay standing. Alistair doesn't even say anything.

They fight and they keep fighting and it _never_ _ends_, but the only alternative is to stop fighting and die, and they _cannot_ do that. Not here, not ever.

Grey Wardens talk about shortened lifespan, but most people only became Grey Wardens because they stubbornly refused to die when they should have in the first place.

They almost fall more times than she can count, she struggles to heal whoever she can, whenever she can, with Wynne's help. But it's rush jobs and she's _tired_ and it seems _impossible_. Simple wounds that should be _nothing_ to fix are... not simple.

And she can't save everyone.

Alistair watches her back, shields her, like she always knew he would, and she wants to cry, she just wants to go _be_ somewhere with him, away from all this _crap_ and death and responsibility.

His eyes are hard. He doesn't laugh or joke anymore. Even Leliana doesn't speak, just stabs things a lot, but there's always, _always_ more darkspawn.

And if that weren't bad enough... above them, _screaming_ in the sky, is the archdemon.

She'd thought the dreams were bad, but there's was no way an image in her head could convey the sheer _terror_ this monster inspires. Good soldiers break and run under its shadow, and they do not survive because there is nowhere to flee.

And Riordan dies. She sees him fall, so far there is not even a broken body to find.

She's paralyzed. She can't take another step, can't look away, can't even run... until Alistair grabs her hand.

"Come on, Rhyanon!" And he smiles. "We'll win this one, too. It's what we do."

They run. They keep running. One step at a time, hand in hand, he covers her.

Fort Drakon.

Dark shadows, blood, screams, and more death. It's what this place was _built_ for, and when she crosses that threshhold the fear settles in her stomach and makes every step heavier. She forces herself to keep moving, keep breathing, one step at a time.

More darkspawn, more magic; fire and lightning and ice, she's become a one-woman army, a war machine, trailing violent destruction behind her in an unmistakable path.

For the first time, she begins to see why people fear her, why they want her locked up. Oh well. She won't survive this anyway, then it won't _matter_ what people think.

They climb up, have to get to the top of the tower, and it comes to her mind unbidden: the image of Ostagar, when they'd done this same thing, when she and Alistair were still hesitant around each other, before she felt comfortable fighting, back when they'd known that _yes_, this was scary, but they still had a whole army, a whole nation, king and Wardens alongside them, waiting for a signal, a fire to win a war.

Now, they only have each other.

But somehow it's enough, because they get to the roof, and she realizes... she isn't scared anymore. There's nothing in her but determination, a sense of _purpose_. She knows why she's here, she knows what to do.

The archdemon's roar deafens her. The stones beneath her feet shake and crack, and some even fall. A choking haze of smoke surrounds them, every breath is full of the stench of charred meat, burning bodies. She runs, dodges, almost slips on a patch of her own conjured ice. Sweat pours into her eyes, pain twinges at her, nagging from faraway injuries she can't be concerned about now.

The dragon screams as the army she's gathered rallies around her. There are swords and arrows and fire and acid, and this leader of the darkspawn horde inspires terror, but it is only one, and they batter away at it, a thousand tiny cuts that leech away its tainted blood until it collapses, broken and dying, on the roof of Denerim's prison.

And she steps out toward it, looking it right in the eye as it blinks and rumbles and moans... and Alistair grabs her arm and pulls her back.

She spins around.

"Let me do this," he demands. "I won't let you die."

"Alistair, _no_. I... I'm okay with this. I've decided. And anyway, _you_ can't die, not after all that work I went through to put you on the damn throne!" She's trying to laugh, the way he does, but it comes out sounding broken, sounding like she's crying. She realizes she is.

"What better king could I be? Sacrificing myself to stop the Blight, before it ever starts. That's worth a song or two at least."

She punches him. He lets her. "Don't be an _idiot_!" she screams. "I won't let you die, either!"

"You say it as if I'm giving you a choice. Rhyanon," he says, and his voice is soft and gentle and comforting and everything she _loves_, but in it she hears the fierce powerful determination that means there's no changing his mind. "This is why I'm _here_. I made you a _promise_, a long time ago, do you remember? _I__ would__ never __let__ anyone__ hurt__ you."_

She nods. She remembers, of course she remembers, but this isn't what that was supposed to mean. He hugs her tight, strong and warm, and tears are streaming down her face and she screams and pushes and punches at him again, but he takes her hands gently in his grip, and whispers in her ear, "This is what I'm _made__ for_. Let me be your shield."

And he kisses her, a last gift, full of passion and fire and love, but there's no regret in it.

And then he runs, too fast for her to catch him, on purpose.

The archdemon screams and dies. The world explodes.


	23. Last Gifts

She blinks slowly and lets the world come back into focus. She feels weak, tired, but she pushes herself past it and forces herself to stand. Whatever injuries she'd had have been magically healed... nothing else would work so quickly, and if she concentrates she can trace the residual mana, leaving it's lingering traces in blood and skin. It must have been Wynne, taking care of her.

She feels cold, she pulls a robe tight around herself and stands... confused, alone. _Alone_. She wonders briefly where Alistair is, figures he must have gone to see Eamon or something.

And then memory crashes down, and she sinks to the ground. She curls into a tight ball and her heart hurts and tears sting her eyes. There's no healing for this kind of pain. Her stomach churns. She feels empty.

And she doesn't remember getting there, she doesn't even remember getting _dressed_, someone must have helped her, she doesn't know who, but suddenly she's standing with Anora - the queen now, and unbidden she remembers that the woman betrayed her and left her and Alistair to be tortured and they would have been _killed_ if they hadn't escaped, and thinking about Alistair makes her almost fall apart again, but she _can't_, because everybody's watching her, wanting her to be their hero.

She puts on the familiar mask as Anora gives a speech she doesn't listen to, so it takes a long time for her to realize that there's a pause, that they're waiting for her to say something.

Leliana whispers that the Queen has asked her if there's any way for the crown to officially reward her for saving Ferelden.

A boon. Anything she wants.

All she wants is Alistair, and they can't give that to her.

But... there's a reason she's this good at pretending she's okay when she's breaking inside, and it comes from a place she knew too well before she ever knew Alistair. It's the place he rescued her from.

"I want the Circle free," she says, in a strong, clear voice.

She sees the shock flicker across Anora's face before she puts up her own mask, and Rhyanon almost smiles.

But she did ask. _Anything_. There's no taking it back now.

"Well, I doubt the Chantry would agree," Anora says, with just a hint of sarcasm. "But very well. Ferelden's mages have earned the right to watch over themselves."

It sounds... so _easy_, when she says it that way. But Rhyanon can't even imagine what it will be like. The Circle without templars? Without the Chantry in control?

_What __about __Anders?_ her inner voice nags, and she almost tells it to shut up because it feels like she's betraying Alistair by even _thinking_ about anyone else in _any__way_ now. But she's doing this for him as much as for anybody.

_"I want the Circle free."_

_I want him free. Will he be allowed to run, now?_

Anora asks her what she plans to do now.

"I think... I'll travel, for a while," she manages to say. It seems smarter than admitting she has no idea.

She thinks her first stop will be Redcliffe. For Alistair. For Duncan.

She knows Alistair will be put to rest in Denerim, in a huge formal ceremony that he wouldn't have wanted and that she doesn't want for him. It's what he gets for being king, even if it was only for a brief while. For once, she's glad they couldn't have been together in public, because it means she doesn't have to be there to fake her way through that.

She can steal away in the middle of the night and watch from some hidden corner, because she won't _abandon_ him, not ever.

They burn his body, one last cleansing fire to send him to the Maker. She wonders if the part of him that was a templar would be comforted by this, or if the part of him that hated everything about the Chantry would _hate_ it.

The Revered Mother says the words, and Rhyanon fights the urge to tell her she doesn't deserve to. She never cared about Alistair when he was just a little kid and she was supposed to watch over him, so she shouldn't get to pretend she cares about him now.

But she remembers the rose and the gardens and the fact that Alistair never held a grudge.

So she just listens to the prayers, and adds her own: her wishes that Alistair really is somewhere in a place where he can be happy forever, her hopes that it's true he can still watch her somehow, that he isn't just... _gone_.

After the funeral, she keeps her promise to go to Redcliffe. Eamon welcomes her into the castle and she wanders around for awhile, but she doesn't stay inside. The castle feels too confining; she will never feel safe inside stone walls.

She goes to the stables, to the kennels, to the places where Alistair felt at home. She curls up in the hay and she feels warm and safe and she knows he's still _here __with __her_. The mabari puppies crawl on her and lick and nibble at her fingers.

It feels strange, to be on her own, without the people she'd gotten so used to following her around. She realizes that she's never been _alone_ before.

Alistair always asked her what to do, where to go, but as she sits on the docks, with her bare toes tracing circles in the cold waters of Lake Calenhad (aware that this same water is lapping up against the base of the Tower she'd gone through so much to get away from), she asks _him_.

And she realizes she's always known the answer.

"We're Grey Wardens now," he'd told her, a long, long time ago at a faraway campfire. "That's what matters."

Not their past, not what they were before, but what they _are_.

_"Join __us __as__ we __carry __the__ duty __that__ cannot __be __forsworn.__ And__ should __you__ perish, __know__ that__ your__ sacrifice__ will__ not__ be __forgotten."_His words, before she'd known him; words that have been said since the first.

Alistair did his duty, and he always trusted her to do hers, even though she'd always insisted that he was the real Warden as much as he insisted that he'd never been a real templar. Well, he'd been right about that, so she supposes he must be right about her too.

Because she's the last one now, the only Warden in Ferelden. It's up to her to rebuild what they lost, to remember everything Alistair gave her by recreating the family that rescued him, and rescued her.

She knows where she's going now. It's Amaranthine.


End file.
